The Whistle Across the Field

Verna has sat in the fourth pew from the back since 1994, and in all that time she has never once cried in a service.

She has watched everybody else do it. She has watched Dorothy Camp go through a whole pack of tissues at a Christmas program. She has watched grown men she went to school with put their heads down during a hymn and their shoulders go. She has sat there dry as a bone, singing the words right, meaning them as far as she can tell, and feeling roughly what she feels when she is shelling beans, which is nothing in particular.

She used to think it would come. When she was young she thought it was a matter of waiting your turn. Then she thought maybe it was a matter of trying, so for about two years she tried, which she will tell you was the most miserable stretch of her Christian life, sitting there working at herself like a woman trying to start a mower that has water in the gas.

Now she is sixty-one and she has made a kind of arrangement with it. She does not expect anything. She comes anyway. She takes the offering count and she runs the kitchen at funerals and she reads her Bible at the table in the morning with her coffee, and if you asked her whether she was saved she would say, well, I would like to think so, and then she would change the subject to your mother's hip.

But here is the thing she does not say. On the drive home from that Christmas program, with Dorothy's tissues still going in the front seat, Verna thought a sentence she has never repeated to a living soul: whatever it is that is happening to them, it is not happening to me, and it has never once happened to me, and after this long I have to be honest and say that probably means something.

I want to talk to you about what it means. Not what you fear it means. What it actually means, which is a different thing, and which has a written word under it.

Because you have run the same arithmetic. Maybe you are not sixty-one and maybe it is not a fourth pew, but you have sat somewhere and watched people receive something you were not receiving, and you have privately concluded that the tears are the receipt and you have never been issued one.

Nobody told you what a witness is

Let me put the pit into plain words, because Verna never has and neither have you.

It is not that you doubt God. You do not. It is that you have quietly filed yourself under probably, but I could not prove it, and you have lived in that file so long it has stopped feeling like a wound. And the reason is that somewhere along the way you were handed a test nobody ever said out loud, which is this: a real one feels it. And you do not feel it. So you sit in the fourth pew and you keep the kitchen running and you do not ask anybody, because asking at sixty-one is worse than not knowing.

Now hear what Paul actually says, because he says something very specific, and it is not what you have been testing yourself against.

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.Romans 8:16

Beareth witness. That is courtroom language, not weather language. A witness is somebody who stands up and states a fact. And notice who is doing the stating: not you. The Holy Spirit is the one giving the testimony, and He gives it with your spirit, down underneath the part of you that shells beans and feels nothing in particular.

You have a testimony being given about you right now by the Spirit of God, and it is being given whether or not your eyes are wet. That is not my encouragement to a dry woman. It is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself named there as the one on the stand.

Weather is not a witness

Around here you learn early that a feeling and a fact are two different animals.

Verna's father used to whistle her in from the far end of the mown field. One long, one short. She could be all the way down by the creek with the water going and the wind wrong, and some days she heard it plain, and some days she did not hear a thing and came up at dark on her own. On the days she did not hear it, the whistle still happened. Her father still stood on that porch and put two fingers in his mouth and called his girl home. The not hearing was about the wind. It was never about whether she was his.

You have been treating the wind as the evidence.

You are His by a work that was finished outside of you, and it is already settled, and your hearing on any given Sunday is not the deed to it. It is written that we are kept by the power of God through faith (1 Peter 1:5), kept by His power and not by our reception, and the Spirit is the one who keeps that word true in a woman on a dry drive home.

And I will tell you something else about your dryness that nobody has told you. You have been reading it as absence. It may just as easily be constitution. Some people are made loud and some are made quiet, and God made both on purpose, and He did not issue the quiet ones a second-class covenant to go with their second-class waterworks. You were not saved into somebody else's temperament.

What He looks at when He looks at you

Here is what I would want said to me if I were sitting in that pew.

When God looks at you, He is not checking your face. He is looking at His Son, and at what His Son did, and at the fact that you were put into Him. Scripture calls it being accepted in the beloved (Ephesians 1:6), which is a strange and wonderful way to put it: the acceptance is not measured on you at all, it is measured on Him, and you are in Him.

You are accepted in the Beloved, and that is already done, and it did not wait on your feelings to sign off on it. I am not saying that over you out of my own good opinion of you; it is written in a letter to a church, and the same Spirit who moved a man to write it is the one carrying it across a kitchen table this morning to a woman with coffee going cold.