The Cards On The Wall

There are nine cards pinned along the hallway wall, and she has read all of them so many times she could say them from the kitchen.

A wedding one, from a couple who could not have children and now have two. A folded piece of card with a child's drawing on it and a scan photo taped inside. One from a man whose scan came back different from the one before, in handwriting that goes uphill toward the corner. One in Polish, which she cannot read, and which somebody translated for her once and she has never forgotten a word of.

Nine cards. Nine people who asked her to pray, and she did, and something happened.

She believes God for all nine of them without a flicker. When somebody rings her at half ten at night and says the words, she does not manage her faith, she does not summon it, she does not have a technique. It is simply there, the way a floor is there, and she prays and she means it and she believes it and she goes back to bed.

And she has a thing of her own. It has been going on for eleven years. She does not put it on the wall and she does not ask anyone to pray about it, and on the two occasions she has, she found herself apologizing halfway through and changing the subject.

She has worked out why nothing has come. She worked it out a long time ago and she has never said it out loud, because saying it out loud would sound like self pity and she cannot bear that.

It is her. She does not have it for herself. She has it in industrial quantities for everybody who rings, and when it comes to her own name she cannot get it off the ground, and she has concluded, quietly, in the way a person concludes a thing they never examine, that this is the reason.

I want to answer that. Not gently, not by degrees, and not with a qualification tucked in at the end.

It is not the reason.

Not partly. Not as one factor among several. Not "well, God works through faith, but". The thing you have been privately holding against yourself for eleven years is not what has been going on, and I am not going to soften that sentence anywhere in this message.

The man Jesus did not correct

There is a father in Mark's Gospel who says one of the strangest sentences in the Bible, and what happens next is the whole of this message.

His son has been ill for years. He has already tried the disciples and it has not worked, which is its own kind of humiliation in front of a crowd. He gets to Jesus and he is careful, and slightly defended, the way people get after a long time of hoping. He says: if you can do anything, help us.

Jesus repeats the if back to him. And the man does not defend himself, or perform, or say the right thing.

Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, "I believe; help my unbelief!"Mark 9:24

Read what he has actually said, because it is not a tidy confession. It is two opposite things in one breath. I believe. And also, my belief has holes in it, and I know, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in front of You.

Now watch what Jesus does with the man.

Nothing.

He does not correct him. He does not send him away to sort himself out and come back when he is more certain. He does not say let us deal with your doubt first. He does not comment on it at all. He turns and deals with the boy.

That is the whole scene, and it has been sitting there for two thousand years for people exactly like you.

Mark 9 was written long before those nine cards went up on that wall, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes what is written and lays it on a real person in a real hallway.

So let me say it in the plainest way I know.

Your doubt is not a disqualification, because your standing with God was never issued on the strength of your certainty. If it were, it would rise and fall with your sleep, your health, your week, and the last thing anybody said to you, and that is not a standing, that is a mood.

You are not held because you believe well. You are held because He holds well.

That is not my reassurance to you. It is what is written, and His Spirit is the one who makes a written line land in a chest that has been arguing with itself for eleven years.

And I want to name the specific shape of your trouble, because it is not general doubt and you should not be handed a general answer. You believe He is able. You have nine cards on a wall about it. What you cannot get to is that He would, for you, personally, by name. That is not the same problem, and it is not a smaller faith, it is a different wound entirely, and it usually comes from somewhere.

I am not going to argue you out of it. Arguments do not reach the place this lives in, and if arguments worked the whole thing would have been talked round years ago, because the case is perfectly makeable and has been made in here more than once.

What actually reaches it is being seen. So let me try that instead.

So hear it said over you plainly. You are seen, right now, in that hallway, and the seeing does not start when your certainty improves; that is what is written, and it is His Spirit who carries it into a real afternoon.

You are the one who prays at half ten at night. You are the one who remembers which week the scan is. You have carried eleven years of your own thing without putting it on anybody, not out of pride, but because you did not want to take up room that somebody else might need. God has watched every bit of that, and He has not once thought of you as the weak link on your own hallway wall.

He knows your name. He is not waiting for you to firm up.