Stringing The Lights

He is up the ladder with a mouthful of cable ties and a string of lights over his shoulder, and his brother-in-law is holding the ladder in the manner of a man who is thinking about something else entirely.

It is for Saturday. His daughter's confirmation, and then everybody back here, which means the yard, which means the lights, which means him up a ladder for two hours on a Thursday evening.

He does not mind. He likes this bit more than the party. There is something about hanging lights before anybody has arrived that he has never tried to explain to anybody.

And while he is up here he is thinking about his uncle, who prayed for the whole family at Easter with his hand on the back of a chair, and who is eighty-one and who has never in his life said an unkind word about anybody.

His uncle said heaven was opening over this family.

And then his uncle said what that meant, and what it meant was that things were going to change for them. Position. Standing. The way people in that town would see the name.

And he had said thank you, tio, and kissed his head, and meant it.

But up here on the ladder with the cable ties in his teeth he knows perfectly well that he does not want that, and has never wanted it, and would not know what to do with it.

What he wants is for God to be at the table on Saturday. Not blessing it from a distance. At it. In the noise, with the plates going round and somebody's toddler under the table and his aunt telling the story she always tells.

That is all he has ever wanted from an open heaven and nobody has ever once offered it to him.

And you know that, because there is a room in your life you would rather God came into than improved.

What actually comes down when the sky opens

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, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a reader hear that verb land where it actually lands.

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 worked it. The Holy Spirit is what turns a sentence that is true into a sentence that is true about you.

So the honest question is what an open sky is for in Scripture when nobody is standing under it predicting anything.

Look at every place it happens. 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 and nobody's standing changes. Somebody is named, and God is there.

Stephen looks up in the last minutes 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, standing, 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). He does not wake up better off. He wakes up in a field that had God in it the whole time.

What comes down through an open heaven is God Himself, and He has never once sent an improvement instead of coming. It is written that He will pour out His Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2:28), and on the day it happened there was wind and fire and God in a room. It is the Holy Spirit, not this paragraph, who takes that off a page and hangs it over a yard on a Thursday.

Now the part that is actually yours, and it is bigger than the ladder.

The thing you want has already been decided in your favor, because the whole direction of the Gospel is God coming to the table rather than calling people up to His. It is written that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and the word under dwelt is the word for pitching a tent: He moved into the neighborhood, and He did not send word ahead about the neighborhood improving first. His Spirit is the one who makes that a yard with lights over it rather than a doctrine in a book.

And the way He does it is exactly the way you would want it done.

God is not a guest who has to be impressed, and He has never once required a family to be somebody before He would eat with them. They complained about Jesus, as an actual formal accusation, that this man receives sinners and eats with them (Luke 15:2). That was meant as a charge. It has turned out to be the best sentence anybody ever wrote about Him. The Spirit is what makes that read like an answer to what you are asking for on the ladder.

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 your standing, and nothing on it will tell you a season is turning, 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, and not the writing, who turns what is on the page into something that holds weight.

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 has a chair at Saturday's table exactly as it is.