Telling Everybody Else To Expect Something

She said it again on Sunday and heard herself say it, which is new.

Expect something. God is not finished with this. Come with your hands open. She has said versions of that from the front for years and she has never once said it cynically, because she believes it, entirely, about every person in that room.

And she drives home to one specific situation in her own life that she stopped expecting anything about somewhere around the second year, and she has never joined those two facts up in the same thought before.

It is not that she thinks she is lying. She would tell you the promise is real and the room needs to hear it and she is the right person to say it. It is that the promise has, without any decision, quietly become something for other people, and she has become the one who carries it and hands it out and does not eat any of it.

Four years now. And this Sunday she heard the gap for the first time and could not stop hearing it for the rest of the day.

If you carry something for a room that you do not carry home, come and sit down at this table. Nothing about your calling is being questioned here.

The gap is not hypocrisy

Let us deal with the word that is going to arrive first, because it will run everything else off the road.

A hypocrite says what they do not believe. You believe every word for every person you say it to, and there is no evidence anywhere that you do not. What has actually happened is that hope for yourself has been worn down by a specific situation in a way that hope for other people has not, and those two things run on completely separate tracks.

That is not a character flaw. Everybody has more faith for their friend's situation than for their own, because they are not the one who has been inside it every day for four years.

You are not a fraud. Nothing about the gap is evidence against your calling, and it has never once made what you say from the front less true. I am not saying it to protect you. The written word says if we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13), which rests everything on His constancy rather than on the state of anybody's expectation, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who makes that hold on a drive home.

The two on the road who had stopped

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a way of getting your own expectation back.

Two people are walking away from a city with the whole thing over, and they explain to a stranger what has happened, and they use a tense that gives everything away.

But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.Luke 24:21

We trusted. Past tense. Had been. Should have. Every verb in that sentence is a verb for a hope that has closed, said out loud by people who had been with Him, on the day it happened.

And He is standing right there while they say it. He does not correct the tense, and He does not rebuke them for it, and He walks the rest of the road with two people who have just told Him to His face that they have stopped expecting anything.

You are in the company of people who said it in front of Him and were kept company anyway. That is written down as the whole shape of that road, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands it in a woman who heard her own gap on a Sunday.

Nothing is being predicted for your situation

Something has to be said very plainly, because this is where a page usually pivots into a promise.

I do not know what happens with the thing you stopped expecting. Nobody does. This article will not tell you a turn is close, or that God is about to move, or that the four years are nearly over, because I have not been given that and an invented promise would cost you more than the quiet has.

You have God's disposition toward you settled, and nothing about your outcome is being announced from this page. Scripture says the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering (2 Peter 3:9), which speaks about His character and never once about a schedule, and the Holy Spirit is the one that has carried four years of expecting nothing exactly as He carried the years before them.

And if this has cost more than anybody in that room knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.