On The Hill In The Rain

It is not dramatic rain. That is worth saying, because dramatic rain would at least be something.

It is the ordinary kind, the kind that is not quite worth a coat and definitely not worth a decision, and she is standing on the hill above the reservoir in it because she walked up here and then stopped walking and has not started again.

She is not upset. That is not what this is.

In the spring somebody sent her a long message. A friend, a real one, who had been praying, and who wrote out at some length that heaven was open over her and then described what that meant, warmly, in about four paragraphs.

She read it twice and typed thank you and a heart, and meant it, and put the phone down.

And she felt nothing.

Not disappointment. Not resistance. Nothing at all, in the same way she has felt nothing at all about most things since roughly November, including things she knows she used to care about, including some things she is fairly sure she still loves.

That is the actual situation. Not that she doubts God. She does not, particularly. Not that she is angry with Him. She has tried being angry and could not sustain it.

She has just gone quiet all the way through, and everybody keeps describing wonderful things arriving, and she cannot make herself want a single one of them, and she has never said that out loud to anyone because of how ungrateful it sounds.

And you know that, because there is a good thing somebody offered you recently that you could not make yourself feel anything about.

An open heaven when you cannot feel anything

Let us settle what governs this whole page. It is not a technique and nothing on it is being asked of you.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He offered to be found out. There is no appeal at the bottom of this page and nothing to sign anywhere on it. 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.

Now the phrase, because other people have been furnishing it for so long that it has almost no walls of its own.

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

That was said to a nation in one decade about one building, where the store room had gone empty and the families who served there had gone home hungry, and what was named was that the fields would not fail again. It is a sentence about people eating. It was never a lever, and nothing you have or have not done has ever operated it. It is the Holy Spirit who does the carrying here, which is what separates a word being spoken over you from a phrase being repeated at you.

So the honest question is what an open sky is for in Scripture, when nobody is standing under it describing four paragraphs of things.

Look at every place it opens. It is the same answer every time.

At the Jordan, the heavens are torn open, the Spirit comes down like a dove, and a voice says, this is my beloved Son (Matthew 3:16). Nothing is delivered. Somebody is named, and God is there.

Stephen looks up in the worst hour of his life and says, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:56). Nothing arrives in his hands. He sees a Person on His feet, and it holds him.

Jacob sleeps on a stone in an ordinary field and wakes up saying, surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it (Genesis 28:16). Notice the last five words. He was lying in it the whole night, and the sky was open over that field, and he could not feel a thing about it until he woke.

Heaven can be open over a person who cannot feel it, and God has never once made His nearness conditional on your ability to register it. That is the whole of Jacob's sentence: the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it. It is His Spirit who takes a line like that and makes it a permission to stand on a wet hill feeling nothing and still be standing under an open sky.

Now the part that is about November.

Numbness is not the same thing as distance, and it is not a door you have closed on God. It is written that He is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18), and crushed in spirit is not a description of somebody having a rich devotional life. It is a description of somebody flattened, and the verse says that is precisely where He is near. The Spirit is what makes that read like an address on a hillside rather than a comfort for other people.

And what is poured out through an open heaven is not something you have to be able to enjoy in order to receive.

What God pours out is Himself, and He is not rationing it to people who are feeling it. It is written that He will pour out His Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2:28), and the day that happened there was wind and fire and God in a room. Flesh is the word. Not the enthusiastic, not the recovered. All flesh, which includes a woman who has gone quiet all the way through.

Now the guardrail, and it is why this whole site exists.

Nothing here connects what you have or have not put anywhere to what God does, in either direction. Nothing on this page predicts a change in your circumstances or in how you feel, and nothing on it will tell you the numbness is about to lift, because nobody writing to you has been given the right to say that. What is being said is what is written: God pours out Himself, His nearness is the gift and not the deposit on one, and He is not rationing it. It is the Holy Spirit who makes a sentence written centuries ago arrive as something addressed to you.

And for the reader who came here with their jaw set: some of you did what that verse was used to ask of you. Sincerely, at cost, and you watched, and nothing opened. Nobody here will explain that away, defend anybody, or hint you misread the terms. Nobody will tell you it was too little or that you believed it wrong, because that is a lie and it has hurt enough people already. Your disappointment and your flatness are both welcome here exactly as they are.