It Was Poured In, Not Worked Up

The lanyard is still on the hook by the back door and it has been there since March.

She keeps meaning to move it. She looks at it most days on the way past with the recycling and thinks, in a way she cannot quite explain, that moving it would be admitting something.

The weekend itself was good. She would say that. Good people, real kindness, a woman on the Saturday afternoon who prayed with her in a corridor and got something right that nobody else has ever got right. She went home in the car with her sister on the Sunday and both of them were quiet in a good way.

It is the last session she cannot get out from under.

The man was not unkind and she does not think he was wrong exactly. He said the thing everybody says. He said, do not let this go. He said, you have to keep it going yourself when you get home, nobody else can do that for you.

And she took it seriously, because she takes everything seriously. She got up earlier. She made a plan. She put worship on in the kitchen while she cooked, and then in the car, and then in the shower, and she prayed with what she can only describe as effort, the way you push at something heavy, and she did that for five months.

She is more tired now than she was in March. And underneath the tiredness there is a thought she has not said to anybody: I cannot get it to light.

Where Paul says the love comes from

Paul has a sentence about the love of God arriving in a person, and I want you to notice two things about it: the verb, and who performs it.

the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.Romans 5:5

Shed abroad. Poured out. It is the word for something spilled generously, and it is passive: the heart is where it lands, not where it is made.

And then the agent. By the Holy Ghost. Not by discipline, not by early mornings, not by atmosphere, not by the woman's own effort applied consistently over five months.

The love of God in you was never something you manufacture and then maintain. It is delivered. You have been trying to produce something that only ever arrives, and there is no version of you that could have made it. That is not a soft reading of a hard verse; it is the grammar Scripture uses, and the Holy Spirit is named in the sentence itself as the one who does the pouring.

What the instruction did to you

Now let me be careful here, because I am not going to run down the man in the last session and you should not either.

He said a true thing badly. There is something real about not drifting, and he was reaching for it. But what you heard, and what a hundred other people in that room heard, was: the keeping of this is now your job. And you are conscientious, so you took the job.

Look at what that job requires. To keep a flame going yourself, you have to be able to generate heat on demand. On a Tuesday when your back hurts. In November. After a bad phone call with your mother. Nobody can do that, and the ones who look as though they can are usually just louder.

You were handed a responsibility God never issued, and five months of exhaustion is what happens to a conscientious woman who accepts one. The written word gives the pouring to the Holy Spirit and gives the receiving to you, and it does not divide the labor any other way anywhere.

And here is the cruelty in it, and I want to name it plainly. When the manufacturing fails, and it does fail, because it is not a thing a person can do, the conscientious woman does not conclude that the instruction was wrong. She concludes that she is. So the lanyard stays on the hook, because taking it down would be filing a verdict.

You are not the reason it did not light, and there was never a mechanism by which you could have lit it. Romans 5:5 says the love is shed abroad by His Spirit and never once says a believer generates their own, and the Holy Spirit is the one delivering it whether or not the delivery can be felt.

Dry feeling is not sin here either. Five months of effort and no heat is not a spiritual diagnosis. It is what effort produces when it is applied to something that was never a task.