He Is Not Nostalgic

He has told it four hundred times, and it takes about six minutes, and it is good.

He knows where the laugh is. He knows to slow down at the part about his father's shop and the money, and he knows to leave a beat after the sentence about the phone call, and he has learned over twenty years exactly how much to say about the two years before it, which is not much.

It is true. Every word of it. That is not the problem.

The problem arrived about eight months ago at a table not unlike a hundred other tables, when a young man who had listened to the whole thing very politely asked him a follow-up question. He said: and what is He doing now?

And he heard himself say: well, He is faithful.

Which is true, and which is nothing, and he knew it was nothing while it was coming out of his mouth, and he has thought about that evening most weeks since.

Because here is what he found out about himself at that table. He has a magnificent account of God in the past tense and he has almost nothing in the present tense. Twenty years of walking with God, and if you took away the story about the shop, he could not tell you what this month has been like between them.

He has started, quietly, to dread the follow-up question.

God refuses to be filed under former things

Isaiah has a pair of verses where God does something that ought to be startling and rarely is. He tells His own people to stop looking at His own past work.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?Isaiah 43:18-19

This is God talking about the Red Sea. That is what the former things are. He is telling a nation to stop dwelling on the single most spectacular thing He ever did for them, and He is not being modest and He is not disowning it.

He is refusing to be a memory.

You are dealing with a God who declines to be remembered instead of known. That is not me pressing a text harder than it goes; it is His own instruction about His own past work in Isaiah 43:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and puts it beside a man at a table with a six-minute story.

Look at the word now in the next line. Not one day. Not eventually. He puts a present tense in the middle of it and asks whether they will recognize it, which tells you the thing He is doing is the kind of thing a person can miss.

Why the present tense went quiet

Now let me say the kind thing, because I think you have been hard on yourself since that evening.

You did not stop walking with God. Look at the actual evidence of the last eight months rather than at how the answer sounded. You have kept going. You have kept telling it. You went home and thought about that question for eight months instead of shrugging it off, which is not the behavior of a man who has quietly given up.

What went quiet is not your life with God. It is your account of it.

And there is a reason, and it is nearly mechanical. A story that gets told four hundred times becomes the way you look at your own life. You built a good frame in your twenties and you have been putting everything through it ever since, and anything that does not fit the frame does not get filed. So this month has been happening. It has just not been getting recorded, because it does not look like a shop and a phone call.

You have been living in a present tense you were not writing down, and the absence of a record is not the absence of the thing. The written word says His compassions are new every morning without exception for the unremarkable ones, and the Holy Spirit has been at work in eight months a man has no story about.

And I want to take the dread off you as well. The young man's question was not an audit. Nobody was checking. You supplied the verdict yourself in the car on the way home, and you have been serving it ever since without anyone else in the room.

You are not on trial for the answer you gave at that table. Scripture puts no condemnation on a person who is in Christ, and it does not add a clause about how fluent they were, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been replaying that evening for you.