I Kept Doing It Anyway

Dottie is at that table at twenty to six and she has not felt a thing in four years.

Same chair. Same cup, which is chipped on the handle side and which she will not replace because the handle sits right in her hand. A chapter, out of order, wherever she happens to be. Then she prays, out loud but quiet, for about nine minutes, and then she gets up and puts the kettle on again for her husband.

She has done this, more or less, since she was thirty-four.

And for the last four years it has been like reading a phone book.

Nothing happened to cause it. That is the part she finds hardest to explain when she has tried to explain it, which is twice. There was no crisis. Nobody let her down. She did not go through anything. It simply went flat one autumn and it has stayed flat, and she has kept sitting in the chair at twenty to six every morning for four years reading words that come off the page like a list.

She said to her sister once, "I think I might be a hypocrite."

Her sister said, "You get up at twenty to six."

And Dottie said, "That is exactly what a hypocrite would do."

Her granddaughter stayed with them in the summer. Sixteen, at that age where they sleep until eleven if you let them, and on the third morning she came down at six.

She did not say why. She got a cup and sat down and did not talk, and Dottie carried on and read her chapter, and the girl sat there with her.

She came down every morning after that.

And near the end of the week she said, "I want this. When I have my own place. I want to be somebody who does this."

And Dottie nearly said: there is nothing in it. There has been nothing in it for four years.

She did not say it.

And then it was October, and the phone went at six in the morning, which is never good.

Her daughter, and it was bad news, and it was the kind you sit down for.

And Dottie was already sitting down.

She had already had her chapter. She was already in the chair. The words that had come off the page like a list twenty minutes earlier were the ones in her, and she took the call in the place she had been going to every morning for four years for no reason she could name.

She has said since that she does not know what she would have done if the phone had gone at eight.

Now let me ask you how long it has been for you.

Because if this is yours you will know the number. Eighteen months. Four years. And you will have wondered, more than once and probably at that same table, whether carrying on with something you feel nothing about makes you a liar.

Do not grow weary

Paul is finishing a hot letter and he slips in a sentence that is not about feeling at all.

Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary.Galatians 6:9

Let us not lose heart. He is writing to people who are doing good and are tired of doing it, and he does not tell them to work up any enthusiasm about it. He tells them not to quit.

In due time. Not on your schedule and not on any schedule you can see, and Paul has enough sense not to name a date. He is a farmer's writer here, and every farmer knows that the stretch between the sowing and anything showing is the stretch where nothing is happening and you keep going out anyway.

So hear this said over you, in a chair at twenty to six with a chipped cup. You are not a hypocrite for going on with a thing you feel nothing about, and four dry years of turning up have been building something you have not been able to see from inside them. That is written into a sentence about sowing and due time, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in a believer, and He does not stop working when a person stops feeling Him at it.

Now let me be careful, because I do not want to hand you a law.

I am not telling you to keep a practice you never chose because a woman in an article did. If your twenty to six is somebody else's idea and it has been eating you, that is a different article and this one is not it.

And I am not telling you the dryness is your fault, or that it is a season God sent to teach you a lesson, because I do not know that and neither does anybody else, and a person who tells you why your dry years happened is guessing at your expense.

What I am telling you is what the four years were.

They were not four years of failing to feel. They were four years of a chair being built.

Every one of those flat mornings put the chair a little more firmly in the floor, so that on the morning the phone went, there was somewhere in your house you could already be. You did not build that in October. October is not when anybody builds anything.

That is what order is for, and it is nearly the whole of what order is for. Not to produce a feeling. To be there when the feeling is gone and everything else is gone with it.

The word says His mercies are new every morning and His faithfulness is great, and that is a sentence about His steadiness, not yours. And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness and intercedes when we do not know what to pray, which means the praying that felt like nothing was not happening on your own.

There was a movement five hundred years ago that took this seriously enough to write it down: forms, a shape for a Sunday, a book that told a tired minister what came next. They were not trying to manufacture feeling. They were trying to make sure that when a man had nothing in him at all, there was still something to stand up and say.