Faith Or Just Being Positive

Yvette had a settled fortnight in the spring and she has spent the four months since trying to work out what it was.

It was about a situation in her family. For roughly two weeks she was not worried about it. Not in a suppressed way; she genuinely was not carrying it, and she noticed at the time how unusual that was and was glad about it.

And then somebody at work, who did not know anything about any of it, said something offhand about how Yvette is always so positive.

And that was that.

Because she is. She is a naturally cheerful woman and she always has been and people say it about her constantly, and it had never occurred to her until that moment that the settled fortnight might have been nothing more than her ordinary temperament with a religious label on it.

She has not been able to get past it since.

She has tried the obvious tests. She has asked whether it felt different from ordinary cheerfulness, and it did, and then she has noticed that of course it would feel different, because she wanted it to be different, and a woman who wants a thing to be a gift will experience it as one.

So she is stuck in the same place as everybody who tries to settle this by introspection, which is nowhere.

And the practical result is that when she feels settled about something now, she does not trust it, and she has started deliberately worrying about things in order to check whether the settledness comes back on its own.

She is fifty-two, and she can hear how that sounds, and she has told nobody.

You may know the loop.

Maybe you are also a cheerful person, or a hopeful one, and maybe somebody has said something offhand that made you wonder whether your whole spiritual life has been a temperament.

Both nouns point outward

There is a definition at the top of Hebrews 11, and the useful thing about it is that neither of its two nouns is a feeling.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.Hebrews 11:1

Substance. Evidence.

Both of those are object words. Substance is what something is made of, what stands under it. Evidence is what a thing rests on in front of other people.

And neither of them describes an internal weather. The definition does not say faith is a feeling of confidence, or a settledness, or an absence of worry. It points at what is hoped for and what is not seen, and then names faith as the substance and the evidence of those.

Which is why four months of checking has produced nothing. You have been examining an interior state against a definition that is not about interior states, and the two do not touch.

And faith is described as substance and evidence rather than as a feeling you can check. The written word gives two object nouns and no adjective about mood, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been checking her own weather since the spring.

And you were never going to settle this by looking inward. The word points the definition outward at what is hoped for and what is not seen, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than issuing an internal reading.

The thing you have been doing instead

Now the loop, and I want to name what it is costing before anything else.

You have started deliberately worrying about things to test whether the settledness returns.

Sit with that for a second. In order to establish whether a gift was real, you have been manufacturing the condition it was meant to relieve. That is a fairly high price for a piece of information you were never going to get, and it has been running for four months.

And notice the shape: it cannot succeed. If the settledness comes back, you will wonder whether you produced it by wanting it. If it does not, you will conclude the fortnight was temperament. Both outcomes were already available before you started.

And you can stop running a test that has no passing result. The word makes faith a thing that stands under rather than a state that can be verified from within, and the Spirit is the one who ends an experiment that was never capable of returning an answer.

And nothing about you is under review for four months of checking. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who can hear how it sounds and has told nobody.

What being cheerful is not

One more thing, and it is the piece that is actually unkind in the sentence your colleague said without meaning anything by it.

Being a naturally cheerful woman does not disqualify you from being given something.

That is worth saying plainly, because the whole four months rests on a hidden assumption: that a gift, to be real, would have to be uncharacteristic. That God does not use the grain of a person, and that anything arriving along the lines you already run must therefore be you.

Nothing in the text works that way. The gifts are distributed to people who remain themselves, and a settled fortnight in a woman who is temperamentally hopeful looks, from outside, exactly like a woman being temperamentally hopeful, and would do even if it were entirely given.

Which means your colleague's observation was not evidence about anything at all. It was a true remark about your temperament, and it landed as a verdict on your fortnight, and those are not the same object.

And a gift arriving along your own grain is still a gift. The word says there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit, and never once requires the thing to be uncharacteristic of the person receiving it, and the Spirit is the one who works in a woman without replacing her.