I Have Never Seen Anything Happen

He worked it out on the way home from a thing in March, and he has not been able to put it down since.

The thing was good. A man he respects spoke, and afterwards people prayed for each other, and he prayed for two people and two people prayed for him, and it was warm and unforced and nobody was strange about it.

And driving home he did an inventory he had never done before, which was: what have I actually seen?

Thirty years. He has been in this since he was nineteen and he has never done it by halves. He has been at the things. He has prayed for people, hundreds of times, and meant it.

And the honest answer, arrived at somewhere on the bypass, is nothing.

Not nothing good. Plenty of good. He can point to marriages that held, and a man off the drink eleven years, and his own life, which he would say without embarrassment is entirely different from what it would have been.

But nothing he could not account for another way. Nothing where he would have to say: I do not know how that happened.

And he is not going to inflate anything. That is the whole trouble. He watches people describe ordinary things in enormous language and it makes him feel physically uncomfortable, and he would rather be quiet forever than do that.

So he has never told anybody. And what has been forming in him since March, in the way things form when they are never said, is a sentence he does not like: I am a spectator. I have believed this properly for thirty years and I have watched from the side of it.

And that is you on your own bypass, or you would not still be reading.

The widest sentence Paul ever wrote about this

Let me put a passage in front of you and then show you the part everybody drives past.

Paul is writing to a church that is arguing about exactly this, which is why it exists. Some of them have visible things happening and some of them do not, and it has turned into a hierarchy, and he is taking it apart.

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.1 Corinthians 12:4-6

Three times he says varieties. Three times he says same. He is building a structure that is deliberately wide at the top and single at the bottom.

And then the last clause, which is the one for you.

It is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.

You are inside that sentence and there is no exemption in it for a man who cannot point to anything. It is written that it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone (1 Corinthians 12:6), and everyone is the widest word available in the language. The Holy Spirit is at work in a man on a bypass who has never seen anything he could not explain.

Now the honesty, because I want to defend it before I do anything else with it.

You are right not to inflate anything, and the discomfort you feel is a good instinct rather than a spiritual problem. It is written that we refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone's conscience (2 Corinthians 4:2). The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth and He has never once needed a man to overstate a Tuesday.

That instinct in you, the one that will not describe an ordinary thing in enormous language, is His. It is not the thing standing between you and Him.

Now the inventory itself, and here is where I think it went wrong.

You counted one category and got nothing, and concluded there was nothing.

Look at what you told me in the same breath. A man off the drink eleven years. Marriages that held. Your own life, which you say without embarrassment is entirely different.

You dismissed all of that in the same sentence you said it in, because you could account for it another way.

You are able to account for it another way and it is still His, because that is what empowering in everyone means. It is written that there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all (1 Corinthians 12:6), and activities is a plain word for things that get done. The Holy Spirit is not confined to the events a man cannot explain.

And I want to say the hardest and most honest thing in this piece, because you will trust me more for it than for anything comfortable.

I am not going to tell you that you have secretly seen extraordinary things and misfiled them. You have not. You know your own thirty years better than any page does.

I am telling you the inventory had one column when it should have had several, and that you scored yourself against a column you were never told was optional.