A Handful I Cannot Account For

Ruby has prayed for a great many people over sixty years and she keeps no records and she can still tell you the handful.

There are four. She would not name them and it is not necessary.

Four times, in sixty years, something happened that she has never been able to explain and has never claimed. She did not announce any of them at the time. Two of the four, she is fairly sure, the person involved never connected with her at all, and she has been quite content with that.

And the rest is everybody else. Hundreds. She would not attempt a number. Most of them she prayed for once and never heard the outcome. A good many of them she watched not get better. Some of them she sat with at the end.

She is seventy-four and she has never stopped, and she is not troubled about the ones who were not healed in the way people assume she must be. She has been at this too long to be shocked by it, and she has never held the view that a prayer is a lever.

The thing she has never resolved is the four.

Because if you have prayed hundreds of times and four of them were like that, what is a person supposed to think about herself? Not much, is her instinct. But there is another instinct that turns up occasionally and says: four is not nothing, and a person to whom that happens four times might have something, and if she has something then she has perhaps not been serious enough about it.

She has never landed anywhere with that. Sixty years and she has never landed.

You may have your own handful.

Maybe yours is two, or one. Maybe you have also never claimed it. And maybe you have also wondered, occasionally and uncomfortably, whether the remainder means something about you.

The word is plural and that is the answer

There is a phrase in the list in 1 Corinthians 12 and almost every English reader walks straight past the grammar of it.

To another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit.1 Corinthians 12:9

The gifts of healing. Both nouns are plural in the Greek. Gifts, plural. Healings, plural.

Which is odd if the thing being described is a possession. You would expect the singular: a gift of healing, held by a person, drawn on as needed.

The plural describes something different. Not one endowment held once, but a series of separate occasions, each of them given, each of them its own event.

Which means the four are not evidence that you have something. They are four gifts, given four times, and the giving happened four times rather than once.

That is the whole answer to a question you have carried for sixty years, and it is in the number of a noun.

And the four were four occasions rather than a possession. The written word puts both nouns in the plural in a way that describes separate givings, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has never been able to land anywhere.

And healing is His and the asking is yours. The word attaches the whole thing to the same Spirit in the same breath, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than issuing an inventory to a person.

Nobody holds this

Let me draw the consequence out, because it settles both of your instincts at once.

Your first instinct was not much, and it was right. Four occasions over sixty years do not constitute an endowment, because the text does not describe an endowment.

Your second instinct was that if you had something you had not been serious enough about it, and that one dissolves too, because there is nothing to have been more serious about. You cannot steward a possession you were never given. What you can do is keep asking, which you have done several hundred times over six decades without a break.

And notice what the plural also protects. If nobody holds it, then nobody can be said to have failed to deploy it. Which means the hundreds who were not healed are not a record of a woman under-using something.

And you cannot have been careless with a thing that was never yours to hold. The word makes the gifts plural and the giver singular, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a release rather than a technicality after sixty years.

And nothing about you is under review for the hundreds. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has sat with people at the end and gone home.

The two who never knew

One more thing, and it is the part I would not want you to miss.

Two of the four never connected it with you at all, and you have been quite content with that.

That contentment is the strongest evidence in this whole account about what you actually are. A woman with an appetite for a reputation does not stay quiet about two out of four for decades, and there is no version of the last sixty years in which you have used any of this for anything.

Which is, if the plural is right, exactly the disposition the arrangement requires. A thing given four times to somebody who would not have announced it is a thing safely given.

And you have carried four occasions for decades without ever once using them. The word says charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, and the Spirit is the one who has been doing that in a woman for sixty years without her noticing it as anything.