Seeing It Made It Harder

Charmaine has watched it happen twice and she would give a great deal not to have.

That is not a thing she can say out loud anywhere. She has tried it once, in her head, in the car, and even alone it sounded like ingratitude, and she has never got closer than that to saying it to a person.

But it is true and it is precise. Before she had seen it, the times it did not happen were a general disappointment shaped like the world. Sad, and expected, and part of how things are.

After she had seen it, every single time it does not happen has a specific shape, and the shape is: it can happen and it is not happening here.

That is the difference and nobody warned her about it.

Twice in nineteen years. And in between, and around, and since, are all the others. The woman from her old church. Two children she has prayed for since they were babies and who are now in their twenties. Her own uncle, over four years.

She still prays. She has never stopped and she is not going to.

But she prays now with a thing running underneath that was not there before, and it is not doubt, and it is worse than doubt, because doubt would at least be quiet.

She is fifty-one.

You may know that underneath.

Maybe you also saw one. Maybe you also found that it made the rest louder rather than easier. And maybe you have also discovered that there is nobody you can say that to.

A colonnade full of people

There is a passage in John that people read for the man and hardly ever read for the room.

In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and eight years.John 5:3-5

A great multitude. And then: a certain man.

Read those two sentences beside each other. The place is full. Blind, halt, withered, in numbers the text calls a multitude, all of them waiting, all of them with lives and families and thirty-eight years of their own.

And Jesus goes to one of them.

The text does not explain that. It does not tell us why that man. It does not say the others were unwilling or that they lacked something or that they were dealt with later off-page. It simply reports a colonnade full of sick people, a conversation with one of them, and then Jesus withdrawing because of the crowd.

Which is the hardest passage in the Gospels for somebody in your position and also the only one that describes your actual experience.

And a room full of people not healed is in the record without an explanation attached. The written word puts a multitude and a certain man in consecutive sentences and never accounts for the difference, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been carrying something she cannot say aloud.

And healing is His and the asking is yours. The word leaves the choosing entirely with Him and does not transfer one part of it to anybody in the colonnade, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring the multitude to be explained.

What seeing it actually did

Now the mechanism, because you described it precisely and deserve to have it confirmed rather than smoothed.

You are right. Before, the absences were general. After, they are specific.

That is not a failure of gratitude and it is not you having taken a good thing badly. It is what knowledge does. A person who has never seen a thing done experiences its absence as the way of the world. A person who has seen it done experiences the same absence as a particular non-occurrence, and particular things are always louder than general ones.

Nobody warned you because almost nobody says this out loud. It is the standard experience of everybody who has seen one and it is discussed almost nowhere, which is why you have felt like the only person carrying it.

And what you are carrying is what knowing does rather than what ingratitude does. The word says he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a description rather than a warning against having seen anything.

And nothing about you is under review for wishing you had not seen it. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who could not even say the sentence alone in a car without it sounding wrong.

What it does not mean

Two things it does not mean, and I want them said plainly because in the space where this goes unspoken people supply their own answers and the answers are usually cruel.

It does not mean the two were for you to learn something from and the others are your failure to apply it. There is no such mechanism anywhere in the text.

And it does not mean the ones who were not healed were passed over for a reason that could be found if somebody looked hard enough. The colonnade is not explained in John and it is not going to be explained here, and anybody who explains it to you is telling you something they do not know.

And you are not required to reconcile the two with the others. The word reports both in consecutive sentences without reconciling them, and the Spirit is the one who lets a woman hold an unexplained thing without it curdling.