Somebody Told Me It Was Wrong

Ruby was nineteen and it took about a minute and she is seventy-four.

The woman was not a stranger and was not unkind and believed every word of what she was saying. She had known Ruby since she was small. She sat her down because she was worried about her, and she said, plainly and with real concern, that what Ruby had was not from God, and that she should stop, and that she would be prayed for.

Ruby said thank you. She was nineteen.

And then she went away and did not stop, because she could not see how to, and because it did not feel like the thing that woman had described, and because she had nowhere to take it and nobody else to ask.

Fifty-five years.

She has never resolved it. She has read a certain amount over the decades and she knows there are positions and she could summarize two or three of them. That has never been the difficulty.

The difficulty is that she has prayed this way, privately, several times a week, for fifty-five years, with a sentence sitting underneath the whole time, and every so often, generally when she is tired, the sentence comes up and she has a bad hour.

The woman died in 1994.

Ruby prayed for her, in exactly the way the woman had told her to stop, on the night of the funeral, and has never known what to make of that either.

You may know that sentence.

Maybe somebody said something similar to you. Maybe they meant it well. And maybe you have carried it for decades without ever being able to put it down or act on it.

What kind of Father the sentence required

There is a passage in Luke where Jesus argues from the ordinary decency of human fathers, and the argument is built to be inescapable.

If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?Luke 11:11-13

Read the shape of it. He does not argue about mechanisms. He asks what kind of father hands over a serpent to a child who asked for a fish.

And the answer, obviously, is none. Not the worst father in that crowd. It is presented as unthinkable, which is why the argument works.

Now hold that beside the sentence you were given at nineteen.

You were a girl who had asked. The sentence you were handed required that what arrived in response was something other than what you asked for, given by the Father you asked, in answer to the asking.

That is precisely the serpent in the illustration, and Jesus puts it forward as the thing no father would do, and then says how much more about yours.

And what arrived came from the Father you asked, and He does not hand over serpents. The written word builds the argument on what no ordinary father would do and then puts a how much more on top of it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has had a bad hour on and off for fifty-five years.

And He gave you a way to pray past your own words. The word ties the giving of the Spirit directly to the asking, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than leaving a girl of nineteen to work out what she received.

Nothing here is against her

Let me be careful, because there is a version of this message that would hand you a grievance and I am not going to.

That woman was not wicked. She had known you since you were small, she sat you down because she was worried, and she offered to pray for you, which is not what a person does who wants to harm somebody.

She believed what she said. People do, in good faith, on all sides of this, and they have for a very long time, and I am not going to settle that argument here and this site is not where it gets settled.

What can be said, without touching her at all, is that a sentence spoken in good faith by a concerned woman in about 1971 is not a verdict, and that a nineteen year old had no way of knowing the difference between a strongly held view and a finding.

You still do not entirely, which is why it comes up when you are tired. That is not stupidity. That is what happens when something is said to a young person by an adult they trust, before they have any framework to weigh it with.

And you are not required to conclude anything about her to be settled about yourself. The word says charity thinketh no evil, and the Spirit is the one who lets a woman hold somebody in good standing and put down what they said in the same afternoon.

And nothing about you is under review for fifty-five years of not resolving 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 has had nowhere to take this since she was nineteen.

The night of the funeral

One more thing, about 1994, because you have never known what to make of it and I think it is the clearest thing in this whole account.

On the night that woman was buried, you prayed for her in the way she had told you to stop.

Consider what that is. Not defiance; there was nobody to defy. Not a point being made; nobody knew. A woman of forty-three, on her own, using the only thing she had, on behalf of somebody who had told her it was not from God.

Whatever else is unresolved, that is what the thing has been used for in your hands.

And what you did that night is what it has been for. The word says pray one for another, and the Spirit is the one who makes that the plainest available evidence about a gift, which is what it gets spent on.