Fourteen Years Of Ordinary

Nabil can tell you the room, the hour and what the air was like, and it was fourteen years ago.

Something was happening in his family and it was serious, and he was in a room on his own at about two in the morning, and for something like forty minutes he believed. Not hoped. Not decided to trust. Believed, in a way that had no effort in it at all, that God had this and it was already handled.

He was not working himself up. That is the part he has never been able to convey. It was more like being told, except there were no words, and it went through him rather than being produced by him.

It lasted about forty minutes and it has never come back.

The situation resolved, in the end, in a way that was neither the disaster nor the deliverance and that took two years and was mostly quite hard.

And here is where Nabil has been living for fourteen years.

He has one night. Everything since has been ordinary: praying because it is right, turning up, doing the next thing, and no surge at all in any of it. He has been in situations since that were as serious as that one, and nothing came, and he stood in them with ordinary faith and got on with it.

And what he has quietly concluded, without ever saying it, is that the forty minutes were the aberration and the fourteen years are the truth about him. That he had one hour of the real thing and has been running on fumes ever since.

He is fifty-three.

You may know the arithmetic.

Maybe you have one night too. Maybe you have been measuring a decade against it and losing.

Where the surge came from

The list in 1 Corinthians 12 includes something that is easy to read past, because faith appears in a list of gifts alongside healing and miracles, which is strange if faith is simply what every believer has.

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

To another faith by the same Spirit.

That is not the ordinary faith that every Christian lives on. Paul is not putting the basic thing in a list of extraordinary ones. He is naming something given at particular moments, to particular people, for particular situations, and he says twice in one verse where it comes from: by the same Spirit.

Which settles the question you have been asking for fourteen years, and settles it in the opposite direction from the one you assumed.

The forty minutes were not you at your best. They were not the level you have failed to maintain. They were a thing handed to you at two in the morning by somebody else, for a situation, and handed things are not sustained by the recipient.

And that faith was handed to you and it was never yours to keep up. The written word puts it in a list of things given and names the giver twice in one verse, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been reading fourteen years as a decline.

And its going is not your collapse. The word makes the Spirit the source rather than the man, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring you to have maintained a state.

What the fourteen years actually are

Now let me say what I think you have been undercounting, because your arithmetic has one column in it and there are two.

You have been in situations since that were as serious as that one. Nothing came. And you stood in them anyway and got on with it.

Read that again, because you wrote it off in half a sentence.

A man who prays because it is right, in a serious situation, with no surge, no sense of anything, and no confirmation, and who keeps turning up for fourteen years, is doing something considerably harder than a man having forty transcendent minutes. The forty minutes required nothing of you. These fourteen years have required something of you every single time.

That is not fumes. That is the ordinary faith the whole New Testament is actually about, and it is the thing being described when Scripture says the just shall live by faith, which is a sentence about a way of living rather than about an experience.

And what you have been calling fumes is the thing the letters are mostly about. The word says the just shall live by faith, which describes a manner of life rather than an event, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a reappraisal rather than a consolation.

And nothing about you is under review for fourteen ordinary years. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has been quietly grading himself against one night since he was thirty-nine.

And the resolution was not a verdict either

One more thing, because it is sitting in your account and you have not looked at it directly.

The situation resolved in a way that was neither the disaster nor the deliverance, and it took two years and was mostly hard.

I suspect part of what has happened over fourteen years is that you have read that outcome backwards onto the forty minutes and quietly wondered whether the surge was therefore not what you thought.

That does not follow, and it is not how the text treats it. The gift is described by its source rather than by what happens afterwards, and there is no clause anywhere making it retroactively unreal if the road turns out long.

And what you were given that night was real regardless of how the two years went. The word identifies the gift by the Spirit who gave it and never by the outcome that followed, and the Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man who has been quietly auditing an old night against a slow result.