Never Once For My Own

Marion has had it four times in about twenty years and every single one of them was about somebody else.

A woman at work in 2007. Her nephew, twice, four years apart. And a family in her church during something that was in the local paper.

Each time it was unmistakable. The settledness arrived without being asked for, it was about a specific situation, and it was not hers. She prayed out of it, and in two of the four cases she told the person, carefully, that she had a strong sense it would be all right, and in both of those cases it was.

She is not claiming a record. Two of the four had outcomes she cannot assess and would not try to.

What she is quite sure about is the pattern, because four out of four is a pattern.

She has carried something of her own for nine years. It is serious and it is not going anywhere and she has prayed about it more than about all four of the others combined, and nothing has ever come. Not once. Not for a minute.

And what she has concluded from four out of four, without ever putting it in a sentence, is that she is a channel rather than a recipient. That whatever this is passes through her toward other people, and that she is the pipe rather than the tap.

She has never said that out loud because it sounds self-pitying and she is not a self-pitying woman. But she operates on it. It is why she stopped asking about her own thing somewhere around year six.

She is fifty-eight.

You may know that pattern.

Maybe yours is three, or seven. Maybe every one of them was for somebody else too. And maybe you also stopped asking about your own at some point and never told anybody why.

Who does the dealing

There is a phrase in Romans 12 that is usually quoted for a different purpose, and the operative word for you is a verb.

For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.Romans 12:3

God hath dealt.

It is a distribution word. Somebody is dealing, and the dealing is done to every man, and the amount and the occasion are not set by the recipient.

Which is precisely the thing your nine years have been quietly disputing.

You have concluded a rule about yourself from four data points. That is a reasonable thing for an intelligent woman to do, and it is what anybody would do, and the rule you arrived at is that you are the wrong kind of thing to receive.

But look at what the verse puts in whose hands. Not the kind of person you are. The dealing.

Which means four out of four is not a fact about your nature. It is four occasions, dealt by somebody else, and a pattern of four does not establish a category about a person any more than four rainy Tuesdays establish a fact about Tuesdays.

And the dealing is His and it was never a rule about what kind of thing you are. The written word puts the distributing in God's hands with no clause about the recipient's type, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has run a rule about herself since about year six.

And you are not a pipe rather than a tap. The word says God hath dealt to every man, which includes the one doing the carrying, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than sorting people into channels and recipients.

Why yours might be different, and why that is not an answer

Now I want to be honest at the place where a message like this normally supplies a reason, because I do not have one and I am not going to invent one.

I cannot tell you why nothing has come for your own thing in nine years. I do not know. Anybody who gives you a confident explanation for that is guessing, and you would be right to be wary of it.

What I can say is what the absence is not.

It is not a report on your faith, because the thing in question is given rather than generated and its absence therefore cannot be a measure of the recipient.

It is not a rule about your type, because the verse puts the dealing in His hands.

And it is not a closed matter, because a pattern of four is a description of what has happened rather than a prediction of what will.

And nine years of nothing is not evidence about you. The word makes it a thing dealt rather than a thing achieved, and the Spirit is the one who separates an absence from a verdict in a woman who has been quietly running the two together.

And nothing about you is under review for having stopped asking. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to somebody who has never told anybody why she stopped.

The thing that is actually different

One observation, and it is not an explanation, and I offer it as something to hold rather than something to conclude.

In all four of the others, you were outside the situation.

Not uninvolved; you cared, and in the case of your nephew you cared enormously. But you were not the one living inside the circumstance, which means there was nothing in you that needed the answer to be a particular way.

With your own, there is. Nine years of needing it to go one way is not a fault and it is entirely human, and it is also a different interior situation to be receiving anything in.

That is a description rather than a cause. I am not saying your need has blocked something, and I want to be very clear about that, because that would put the whole thing back on you and it is exactly the sentence this category exists to refuse.

And you have not blocked anything by needing it. The word never once makes the recipient's state a condition of the dealing, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a release rather than one more thing to manage.