The Day I Stopped Waiting For The Feeling

It is a Tuesday and there is cereal on the counter and one of them cannot find a shoe.

That is the whole scene. There is nothing else in it.

And somewhere in the middle of buttering toast you had a thought that has been circling for about four years, and this time it arrived in words instead of as a feeling.

The thought was: I am still waiting to feel like it is mine.

Not the toast. The other thing. The one that got settled, in principle, a long time ago, and that you have believed accurately ever since without it ever having landed anywhere that you could point to.

You know all the right things about it. You could explain it to somebody at length and it would be correct and it would help them.

And every so often, doing something ordinary, you notice that you are still standing outside it waiting for a signal.

Let me say something before we go on.

I am not correcting you.

Waiting for a feeling is not greed and it is not immaturity. Wanting something to land is one of the most human things there is, and I am not going to tell you the four years were a waste.

I am saying I heard the thought at the counter. That is all.

What manner of love

Here is a sentence John writes, and he interrupts himself in the middle of it, which is worth noticing because he was an old man and a careful writer.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.1 John 3:1

Hath bestowed.

Past tense. Completed. Not is bestowing, not will bestow when the conditions are right. The bestowing is finished and John is asking us to look at it, which is what behold means.

And then look at the last clause, because it explains something about the experience of this.

The world knoweth us not. There is a gap, John says, between what is true about a person and what registers about them from the outside. He mentions it because he knows people will notice it and wonder.

And what he does not say, anywhere, is that the bestowing waits for the registering.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, at that counter in the low morning light.

You are called a son of God by a completed act. Not one day, not once it lands, not when the feeling arrives to confirm it. Right now, with a knife in your hand and somebody shouting about a shoe, you are what 1 John says you are called, and the calling is in the past tense and it was not conditional on anything registering. That is not my kindness. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real man in a real kitchen.

Now, about the feeling.

I want to be careful because I am not going to promise you it never comes. It often does, and usually at some entirely unremarkable moment, and usually a long time after the thing was actually settled.

What I want to say is that it is not the deed. It never was.

A feeling is a report from your own interior about something that already exists elsewhere. It is a good thing when it turns up and it has no authority over the thing it is reporting on.

And the crossing you have been waiting four years for does not require it. The crossing is that you say the thing in the first person on a Tuesday and go on with the morning.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You have a bestowing that was completed before you were waiting for it. The word says hath bestowed, past tense, finished, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real kitchen on a real weekday morning with the light coming in low.

It can be today. It can be this ordinary. That is the whole of what I came to say.