Nothing Showing on the Outside

Two people have asked her, kindly, and she has not been able to answer either of them.

The first was her mother, at Easter, and it was not a challenge. Her mother was pleased for her, in the careful way of somebody who does not fully understand a thing but wants to be supportive, and she said: so what is different, then?

The second was a woman at the school gate who had heard about it from somebody else and asked with genuine interest, the way you ask about a new job.

Both times Chantal said something vague. Both times she went home and thought about it for an hour.

Because three years in, she has nothing to produce. She has not stopped anything dramatic, because there was not much dramatic to stop. She has not started anything visible. She does not go to a midweek thing. She does not have a testimony with a shape to it, the kind that goes somewhere. If you put her old life and her new life side by side on a table, a stranger could not tell you which was which.

She is thirty-eight, she has two children, she works four days, and she is a Christian, and there is no external evidence whatsoever, and she has begun to find that fact loud.

It is loudest at the gate at three fifteen, waiting, watching other people's lives, doing the arithmetic on her own.

If somebody has asked you kindly and you had nothing to say, hear this. There is a verse that tells you exactly where the answer is currently being kept, and it is not a consolation prize. It is an arrangement, and it is deliberate.

Where the life is being kept

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

Your life is hid. Not: your life is small. Not: your life is not yet started. Hidden, which is a statement about location and visibility rather than about size or quality.

And then two prepositions that are doing a great deal of work: with Christ, and in God.

So the arrangement is this. The real thing, the actual life, is currently stored somewhere. It is stored in company, with Christ, and it is stored in a place, in God. And the next verse says what happens later: when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. There is a scheduled appearing. It is not now.

Chantal has been treating the invisibility as an absence of contents. The verse says the contents are real and are being kept somewhere she cannot open.

You have a life that is hidden with Christ in God, and it is already stored there, and hidden is a word about where it is rather than whether it exists. I am not making the best of a woman's three empty years. It is written in Colossians 3:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence about storage and lays it on somebody at a school gate at three fifteen.

The question was asked at the wrong window

And here is the specific thing for a woman being asked kindly by people she loves.

Her mother's question was fair. So was the woman at the gate. They were asking the only kind of question a person can ask from outside, which is: what can I see?

But they were asking at a window that this particular arrangement does not have. It is not that Chantal is failing to answer. It is that the answer is not filed in that department, and no amount of good will on anybody's part can move it there.

And that means she can stop performing. She has been under a low pressure for three years to produce something answerable, and every time she cannot, she reads the failure as a report on her interior. It is a report on the filing system.

You are not required to produce evidence at a window that was never meant to have any, and it is already filed elsewhere. Scripture says man looketh on the outward appearance but the LORD looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who reads the department where the answer actually is.

What has actually changed, and why she cannot see it

And now let me point at the thing, because there is one, and it is precisely the kind that never shows.

Three years ago, at that gate, at three fifteen, Chantal was afraid all the time. Not dramatically. The low continuous kind, about money, about her son, about whether she was doing any of it right, and she has told exactly one person that and it was years ago.

She is not now. It is not gone; it comes back on bad weeks. But the thing that used to run underneath everything, all day, every day, is not running underneath everything anymore, and she noticed that about eight months ago and did not tell anybody because it did not seem like the sort of thing you say.

You cannot see the absence of a fear from outside. There is no visible sign of a woman not being afraid. It is the single most significant thing that has happened to her in a decade and it is invisible by nature, and she has been standing at a gate concluding that nothing has changed.

You have something enormous that is already changed and does not show, and the not showing is the nature of the thing. It is written that your life is hid with Christ in God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the largest work in the places nobody can inspect.