Reproducing The Circumstances

Ross has been back to that room eleven times and he has never told anybody why.

It is a small chapel about forty minutes from where he lives, and it is open in the afternoons, and eight years ago he was in it on a Wednesday for reasons that had nothing to do with anything, and something happened.

For about an hour he had a certainty about a situation that he has never had before or since. Not a feeling exactly. A settledness, entirely without effort, that a thing was going to be all right.

It was.

And what he has done since, over eight years, is go back. Eleven times, roughly annually and then more often, and always on a Wednesday afternoon, and he sits in the same part of the chapel.

He has also, and this is the part that embarrasses him, reconstructed other elements. He noticed at some point that he had been fasting that day, accidentally, having missed lunch. So a couple of times he has missed lunch. There was a particular thing he had been reading that week. He has read it again.

Eleven attempts. Nothing.

He is fifty-one and he is not a superstitious man and he can hear how this sounds, which is why nobody has ever been told. He would not put it in these words even privately, but the shape of what he has been doing is: I do not know which of the conditions caused it, so I will reproduce all of them.

You may have your own chapel.

Maybe you have gone back to a place. Maybe you have played the same music, or sat in the same seat, or gone at the same hour. And maybe you have never said out loud what you were hoping the conditions would do.

The word is author

There is a phrase in Hebrews that answers this exactly, and the answer is in a single noun.

Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.Hebrews 12:2

Author.

The word means originator, the one who begins a thing. And finisher is the one who completes it. Which puts both ends of the whole business in the same hands, and neither of those hands is yours, and neither of them is a chapel.

Read what that does to eleven Wednesdays.

You have been treating the room, the hour, the fasting and the reading as the mechanism, and the certainty as the output. That is a perfectly rational model and it is how a sensible man investigates something he does not understand.

It is just not the model the text uses. The text names a person as the origin, which means the search for conditions is a search for a cause that is not in the conditions and never was, and eleven negative results are exactly what that search will keep producing.

And what began that hour was a person and not a set of conditions. The written word names Jesus as the author of faith and puts the origin in Him rather than in circumstances, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been missing lunch on Wednesdays.

And you cannot summon it and were never expected to. The word puts both the beginning and the completing in His hands, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring a reproducible method.

What eleven attempts have actually cost

Let me say the kind thing and the true thing together, because they are the same thing.

There is nothing shameful in what you have done. A man who has experienced something real and cannot get it back will try to find the mechanism, and trying to find the mechanism is not superstition; it is the ordinary response of an intelligent person to an unrepeatable event.

But look at what eight years of it has produced.

It has produced eleven afternoons in a chapel, which is not a bad way to spend eleven afternoons, and a slowly growing sense that the failure to reproduce it is about you. That is the cost. Every negative result has quietly been entered against your own account rather than against the model, because the model was never examined.

The model was wrong. Not you.

And eight years of nothing is evidence about a method rather than about a man. The word puts the authoring in Him, which means a failed reproduction tells you about your assumptions and not about your standing, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a release rather than a technicality.

And nothing about you is under review for eleven Wednesdays. 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 never told anybody about the fasting.

What is worth keeping

One thing, and it is small, and it is worth saying because a message like this can throw out something good along with the model.

Keep the chapel if you like it.

Not as a mechanism. As a place you have gone eleven times over eight years, which makes it a place with your own history in it, and there is nothing wrong with a man having somewhere he goes.

What can be dropped is the hope attached to it, and the lunch, and the reading, and the Wednesday. Go on a Tuesday, after a proper meal, and sit somewhere else, and notice whether you still like it. If you do, it was always the place. If you do not, you will have learned something worth eight years.

And you are able to go somewhere without asking it to produce anything. The word says be still, and know that I am God, and it attaches no conditions and no method to the stillness, and the Spirit is the one who supplies what a room never could.