The Testimony That Got Polished

Somebody asks every time. At every gathering, somebody who has not heard it asks, and somebody who has heard it forty times says, go on, tell them.

And you tell it.

You know where the laugh is. You know where to slow down. You know that if you pause after the part about the phone call, the whole room goes with you, and you have known that for about fifteen years now.

It happened. That is important and I want to say it before anything else. The thing you tell people actually happened to you and you have never added a single fact to it.

But somewhere in the telling, over the years, it stopped being something that happened to you and became something you perform about a man who used to be you.

You noticed it properly this time. Halfway through, at the part where you always put your hands up, you heard yourself doing the voice.

And afterwards everybody was warm and somebody's mother said God is so faithful and you agreed, and then you carried the plates through and stood at the sink for a bit.

Let me say this before we go on.

I am not accusing you of anything.

You are not a liar. Not one detail of that story has drifted and you have been careful about that in a way most people are not. And a testimony that has a shape to it is not a dishonest testimony, it is a well told one.

I am saying I heard you notice the voice. That is all.

Where He is looking

Here is what God said to a prophet who was looking at a line of impressive young men.

For the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.1 Samuel 16:7

Almost everybody reads that verse as a warning. It gets used to make people nervous.

Read it the other way round for a minute, because Samuel needed it as relief rather than as a threat. Samuel was about to make a serious mistake on the basis of what looked right, and God stopped him by saying: I am not working from that.

Which means the polished version does not impress Him and the polished version does not fool Him either, and both halves of that are good news for a man standing at a sink.

He has not been receiving your testimony as a performance. He was in the actual thing when it happened, and He is the only person in your life who has never once heard the polished version, because He was there for the original.

So let me turn and say it straight to you, with your hands in the water.

You are seen at the heart rather than at the delivery. Not one day, not when the story means something to you again, not when the voice goes. Right now, at that sink with the room still going next door, you are what the LORD is looking at, and He has never once been in the audience. That is not my consolation. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written line down onto a real man in a real kitchen.

Now, why did it polish?

Because you told it kindly, over and over, to people who needed it.

Every one of those forty tellings was for somebody. You learned where the laugh was because a room that laughs stays with you. You learned where to pause because the pause is where people get through the door. That is craft, and craft was developed in service of other people, and the wear on it is the wear of use.

That is not sin. That is what happens to a true story that has been carried a long way in a man's mouth.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have a testimony that God knows the unpolished shape of, and the original is still on file with the only one who was there. The word says the LORD looketh on the heart, which is a sentence about where He is looking rather than a warning about what He might find, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real house on a real Sunday afternoon.

The story is still yours. It has just been in the shop window a long time, and nobody has taken it down and held it lately.