I Was Waiting To Be Overpowered

Bríd has been waiting nineteen years for something to come over her and it never has.

She knows exactly what she is waiting for, because she watched it at twenty-two. A woman in a room she used to be in would go still, and then say something, and there was a quality to it that everybody present understood without discussing: she was not choosing to say it. It was coming through her.

Bríd has never had that. Not once, not in nineteen years, not for a second.

What she has had, constantly, is something much quieter. A thing about a person will settle in her, plainly, and stay there. It does not go away. She can think about it, weigh it, decide whether now is the moment, and leave it for a week if she wants to.

And that, precisely, is why she has never trusted it. Because she can hold it. Because it waits for her. Because she is entirely in charge of whether it ever gets said, which is not what she watched at twenty-two, and so she has concluded that what she has is simply her own thinking about people.

She is forty-one. She left that room about a decade ago for reasons that had nothing to do with this, and she has not really been in one since, and the standard she took away with her is still doing its work quietly wherever she is.

And the cost is that she has said almost none of them. There is a long line of quiet true things about specific people stretching back years, all of them held, none of them delivered, all of them waiting for a compulsion that has never arrived.

You may know that waiting.

Maybe you also saw the real thing once and learned what it was supposed to look like. Maybe you have never been overtaken. And maybe you have been holding a line of them ever since.

Who is subject to whom

There is a short verse in the middle of the instructions about order, and it settles the question you have been holding for nineteen years, in eight words.

And the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.1 Corinthians 14:32

Subject to the prophets.

Not the other way round. The person is not carried; the person is in charge. Paul writes it as the reason a person can wait their turn, hold their peace, and choose the moment, which is the whole argument of the surrounding paragraph.

Read what that assumes. It assumes you can hold it. It assumes it will still be there in five minutes. It assumes there is a person with a will who decides when and whether, because otherwise the entire instruction about order would be impossible to obey.

Which means the very quality that made you distrust yours is the quality the text expects. Being able to hold it is not the evidence against. It is the design, stated plainly, in a chapter about how a room should run.

And the fact that you can hold it is the design rather than the disproof. The written word puts the person in charge of the thing in eight words, precisely so that a room can be orderly, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a woman who has held a line of them for nineteen years.

And He speaks and you can carry it plainly. The word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal, and the Spirit is the one who supplies it rather than requiring a state you can feel arriving.

What you actually saw at twenty-two

Now the thing you built the standard out of, because you should not be made ashamed of watching carefully.

You saw something real. I am not going to tell you that woman was performing, because I was not there and it would be cheap and you would know it was cheap.

But you learned a look. Twenty-two years old, in a room, watching one person's manner, and what you took away was not a doctrine but an impression: this is what it looks like when it is real.

An impression formed that way is enormously durable and almost impossible to argue with, because it never presents itself as an opinion. It presents itself as recognition. And you have carried it through a decade of not being in that room at all, which is exactly what impressions do.

And it was one woman. One manner. One temperament, in one place, in one style of gathering. Nothing in the text ever said her manner was the measure, and it was never offered to you as one; you simply had eyes.

And what you built was an impression rather than a standard. The word says we walk by faith, not by sight, and the Spirit is the one who makes that apply to a look you learned across a room half a lifetime ago.

And nothing about you is under review for nineteen years of holding back. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who was being careful rather than disobedient.

And I am not telling you what she had

Let me be plain about what I am not doing, because it would be easy and it would be wrong.

I am not adjudicating that woman, or that room, or what happens when somebody goes still. That is not mine to settle and this page is not the place, and people who were actually present would know better than I do.

And nothing here hands you a future to hand anybody. Not an outcome, not a date, not a word about anybody's health or marriage or death, because that is not this and never was, and the fence around this exists so that saying something to one person stays survivable if you are wrong.

The only thing on offer is that quiet, held, waitable, entirely-under-your-control material is what this verse describes, and that you have been sitting on a line of it because it did not feel like something you saw once.

And you are permitted to speak the one you can hold. The word makes control the assumption rather than the exception, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a lower grade of the real thing.