Somebody Said I Should Have Expected More

It was said to Bethan in a corridor and it took about six seconds and she has carried it for three years.

The situation had not gone the way she asked. She had asked properly, over months, and she had told a small number of people, and it had not come.

And a woman she barely knew, who meant well, and who has probably never thought about it again, said something to her afterwards in passing. Not cruelly. In the tone of somebody offering a key.

Sometimes we do not see more because we do not expect more.

Six seconds. And Bethan has thought about it several hundred times since, always at night, and what she has been doing all that time is auditing the months before.

Did she expect enough. Was there a point where she started hedging. She can remember one particular evening where she added if it be Your will and she has gone back to that evening more times than she can count, trying to work out whether that was submission or whether it was her lowering the bar and therefore, on that woman's theory, closing the door herself.

She is thirty-eight.

You may have your own corridor.

Maybe somebody handed you a key like that. Maybe they meant well. And maybe you have been auditing yourself with it ever since.

The sentence is refused here

Let me deal with that sentence first, plainly, before anything else, because it is the whole injury and it has been in you for three years.

It is not true, and I will not teach it, and this site will not carry it in any form.

Not softened. Not reframed as a principle with exceptions. The idea that an outcome did not arrive because the person asking did not supply enough expectation puts the weight of what happens on the one who is already carrying the loss, and that is precisely the thing we do not do here and never will.

Nothing in your months closed a door.

I want that said flatly rather than argued to, because you have been arguing with it for three years and argument has not moved it.

And nothing you did or failed to expect determined what happened. The written word never once makes an outcome contingent on the quantity of a person's expectation, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been auditing an evening for three years.

And you are not carrying a burden that was ever yours. The word says casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you, and the Spirit is the one who takes a weight off somebody rather than adding a mechanism they should have operated.

The man who asked three times

There is an account in 2 Corinthians of somebody asking repeatedly and being told no, and the striking thing is what is not in it.

For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:8-9

I besought the Lord thrice.

This is Paul. The man who, by his own account in the same letter, had been caught up into the third heaven. Whatever anybody thinks the ceiling of expectation looks like, he is above it.

And he asked three times and it did not depart.

Now read the answer he was given, and read it for what it does not contain. There is no suggestion that he asked wrongly. No hint that a fourth time with more conviction would have done it. No mention of his expectation at any point. The answer is about grace and about strength, and it addresses his situation rather than his technique.

If the mechanism that woman described in the corridor were real, this is precisely where Scripture would say so, to precisely the man who could have been told, and it is not there.

And the answer given to a man who asked three times said nothing about his expectation. The word records the refusal and the reason and never once mentions the asker's quantity of belief, and the Spirit is the one who makes that absence load-bearing rather than incidental.

And He still does this and He is not obliged to do it for you today. The word holds His ability and His freedom together in one account, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than converting a request into a transaction.

The evening you keep going back to

One more thing, about if it be Your will, because you have been to that evening several hundred times.

That phrase is not a hedge. It is what Jesus prayed in a garden on the worst night of His life, in a request that was not granted in the form He asked it.

If adding it closes a door, it closed one there.

And notice what the woman's theory would require you to believe: that a phrase spoken by Christ in Gethsemane is a mechanism by which people reduce what God does. That is not a small implication and it is not one anybody would sign if it were stated plainly, which is how these sentences do their damage. They are never stated plainly. They arrive in corridors, in six seconds, offered as keys.

And the words you added that evening were the ones He used Himself. The word records that prayer in a garden with the same clause in it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that settle an evening you have visited several hundred times.

And nothing about you is under review for three years of auditing. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has been marking her own months at night.