Mine Never Come With Force

She grew up around people who knew when God was speaking, and she has never once doubted them.

That matters, because this could easily turn into an article that quietly runs down the room she came from, and it is not going to. Those were good people. What she saw was real. There was a woman in that congregation who would stand up at eleven minutes past nine on a Sunday and say something, and the thing she said would be right, and it happened enough times over enough years that nobody there needed convincing.

She watched that from the age of six.

And what she absorbed, without one person ever teaching it to her, is that this is what it looks like when God speaks. It arrives. It has weight. You know.

She is fifty-three now and it has never once happened to her like that.

What she gets, and has always got, is small. A name at the sink. A sense, walking past a door, that she should knock, which lasts about two seconds and has no authority in it at all. Sometimes something so faint that by the time she has turned round to look at it properly it has gone.

And for the whole of her adult life she has filed those as her own thoughts.

Not out of unbelief. Out of respect, if anything. She has seen the real thing. She knows what it is like when God speaks to somebody, and she is not going to dress up her own passing notions in that language and put them next to what that woman used to do.

So she has waited. Thirty-odd years, faithfully, for one to come with weight.

And a fortnight ago somebody she barely knows said to her, in passing, that she had been on her mind, and it turned out to be about something. And the woman said: it was only a little thing, I nearly did not say.

And she has not been able to stop thinking about the phrase only a little thing.

And that is you at your own sink, or you would not still be here.

The famous list, and where God turned out to be

Let me take you to a mountain, because the passage everybody quotes is doing exactly your question.

A man is at the end of himself and God tells him to stand on the mountain because the Lord is about to pass by.

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.1 Kings 19:11-12

Three arrivals with weight. Three times the text stops and says: not there.

And then a sound so slight that the older translations call it a still small voice, and the man covers his face, because that is the one.

Now here is what I want you to notice, and it is the thing that makes this yours.

The man on that mountain was Elijah. Fire from heaven Elijah. If there was ever a person in Scripture whose whole history was God arriving with force, it is him, and this is the day he is taught that the force is not where God is.

You are not missing a category of experience, and quiet is not the lesser version. It is written that the Lord was not in the wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, and after the fire came the sound of a low whisper (1 Kings 19:11-12). The Holy Spirit does not become more Himself at higher volume.

Now let me deal with the respect, because your reason for dismissing your own promptings is a good reason and it needs handling carefully rather than swept aside.

You have not wanted to put your passing notions next to what that woman did. That is humility and it is real and I am not going to talk you out of it.

But look at what you have actually been doing with it.

You have taken a right instinct, which is do not announce things, and you have used it to justify a second thing, which is do not act on anything. Those are not the same. That woman stood up in front of a congregation and said something out loud, and you were right to hold that as serious. Knocking on a door is not that.

You are free to act on a small one without ever claiming it came from God. It is written that we are to encourage one another and build one another up (1 Thessalonians 5:11), and nobody has to be told a source for a knock on a door to be a kindness. The Holy Spirit is not asking you to stand up at eleven minutes past nine.

And the phrase that has been going round in you for a fortnight.

It was only a little thing, I nearly did not say.

You have been given little things for thirty years and they were never a lesser grade of the same currency. It is written that whoever has despised the day of small things shall rejoice (Zechariah 4:10), and despised is the word God chose for what people do with small ones. The Holy Spirit has been putting names in front of a woman at a sink since she was in her twenties, and He was not waiting for her to be ready for something bigger.