Ninety Seconds And Nothing To Say

She said yes on a Sunday because she always says yes, and it is on Thursday, and it is ninety seconds.

That is all it is. Ninety seconds, before the thing starts, about something God has done for her. The woman who asked was lovely about it and said it did not have to be dramatic and that people prefer the ordinary ones anyway.

She has had four days.

Monday she thought about it on the bus and had nothing, and told herself that was because she was tired.

Tuesday she sat down properly with a notebook, which is what she does with problems, and wrote the date at the top and then a heading, and then nothing, for twenty-five minutes, and then she made toast.

Wednesday she went at it a different way and tried to remember the last time she had felt something in a service, and found one, from about two years ago, and then realized she did not know what had actually happened in it or what she would say about it.

And this afternoon she caught herself doing arithmetic she is not proud of. Working out whether there was anything she could describe in a way that would be true but would sound like more than it was.

And that is the thing that has stopped her. She is sitting at the kitchen table with a pen in her mouth thinking: I am twenty-three and I have been doing this since I was fourteen, and I cannot produce one thing that does not sound made up.

And you know that, because you have been asked for a story and gone looking and come back with nothing.

The blank is not a fact about your faith

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and nobody here is going to write your ninety seconds for you.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in the famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes the sentence back off the people who borrowed it.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and it was never a lever.

And here is what belongs to this page in particular.

God had already been faithful to those people for centuries before He ever invited them to test Him, and He has already been faithful to you for years before anybody asked you for ninety seconds. That invitation arrives at the very end of a long book, spoken to people whose whole national story is a record of things He had already done. The test was never the start of His faithfulness. It was a nudge to notice something that was already there. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who takes that and gets it as far as a kitchen table with a pen in it.

Now the four days, and they need honesty rather than reassurance.

The blank is not ingratitude and it is not a fact about your faith. If anybody has ever implied to you that a person who cannot produce a testimony has not got much going on, they were wrong, and it was unkind, and it is not what Scripture does with forgetting.

Forgetting is the ordinary condition of a person, and God has never been surprised by it. It is written, bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits (Psalm 103:2), and nobody warns you about forgetting a thing you were never going to forget. It is written, I will remember the deeds of the Lord, yes, I will remember Your wonders of old (Psalm 77:11), and that is somebody in a bad night deciding to go and look rather than waiting to feel something first. The Spirit is the one who makes that permission rather than homework.

And here is the passage for a person with a notebook and a heading and nothing under it.

He asked them. When I sent you out with no purse, He said, did you lack anything? And they said, nothing (Luke 22:35).

They did not offer it. It was not sitting at the front of their minds and they were not going round telling people. He put the question, and they went and looked, and the answer was there the whole time.

You are not being asked to feel something, you are being asked to go and look, and those are two completely different jobs. It is written that you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you (Deuteronomy 8:2). Remembering there is an action with feet on it, not a mood you produce. His Spirit is what makes that a walk rather than a performance.

Now something specifically about Thursday, and it matters more than the rest.

Nobody here is going to help you find something that will sound good. That instinct you caught this afternoon is not a character flaw, it is what happens to anybody who has been handed a microphone and a genre, and the genre is the problem rather than you. A story that has to have a shape will always leave out the ordinary things, and the ordinary things are nearly all of it.

And nobody here is going to build your list either, because three of somebody else's items and a blank page is exactly where you started.

And when you do have three, nobody is going to turn them into a pattern. They will not tell you what happens next and they are not a system and they do not add up to a prediction about your twenties. They are three things that happened, and that is enough, and it does not have to be enough for ninety seconds.

God proved Himself long before anybody asked you to describe it, and the finding out is looking rather than performing. It is written that He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), so whatever you find will not be a fluke. It is the same Person you are sitting at the table with. It is the Holy Spirit, not anybody writing, who takes what is written and makes it land in the room you are actually in.