When I Do Not Feel It

Deborah is the one who prays at two in the morning, and she is exhausted.

Everybody knows the two in the morning thing. She has got up out of bed for people. She has driven across a city because something would not leave her alone. She has prayed with a woman in a car park for forty minutes and neither of them noticed the rain.

None of that is performance. That has to be said plainly at the top, because there is a version of this article that turns out to be a quiet attack on people like Deborah and it would be a lie. The fire is real. It has been real her whole life. People have been genuinely helped and some of them will tell you so.

Here is the problem, and she has known it for a while without a word for it.

She has no floor.

When she feels it, everything happens. And when she does not, nothing does. Not less. Nothing. She does not pray, she does not open it, she does not call anybody, she does not go. Three weeks will go by and she will surface and be shocked at the date.

She has never in her life done a thing she did not feel.

Priya has been walking with her for about a year. Hard year, and Deborah has been the best thing in it, and that is not an exaggeration.

And in March, Priya texted her on a bad night.

And Deborah was three weeks into a flat stretch. And she read it, and she did not have anything, and she has never learned how to move without having anything, and so she did not answer.

Four days.

She answered on the fourth day and she answered beautifully, because that is what she is like, and Priya said it was fine and meant it.

But somebody had already picked up that night, and it was Deborah's mother.

Her mother is seventy-eight and Deborah has privately thought of her, for twenty years, as the one with less. Less fire. Less feeling. The one who just does it: same seat, same Tuesday, same laminated list of names in the front of her book with the dates written next to them in pencil.

Priya was on that list. Tuesday.

Her mother called her because it was Tuesday. Not because she felt anything.

Now let me ask you what happens in your flat weeks.

Because if you are built like this you already know. It is not that you do less. It is that there is no floor under you at all, and you have been treating that as the price of being somebody with a fire, and you have been paying it for years.

The sentence at the end of a loud chapter

There is a chapter in First Corinthians about a church where a great deal is going on.

I am not going to relitigate what was going on in that room, because people have argued about it for four hundred years and this article is not the place where that gets settled and I would not be doing you a kindness by pretending otherwise.

Read what Paul does with it, which everybody agrees on.

He does not tell them to want less.

He spends the whole chapter inside their life, taking it seriously, and then he ends the thing like this:

But all things must be done properly and in an orderly manner.1 Corinthians 14:40

That is the last line of the chapter. Not a rebuke of the fire. A frame put round it, by a man who has just written that he would rather they were all filled up than not.

And two verses earlier he says God is not a God of confusion but of peace. Which he says in the middle of the most charged chapter he ever wrote about a meeting.

So hear this said over you, standing in a church kitchen after everybody has gone. The fire in you is not the problem and it was never going to be asked for back, and the shape you have refused your whole life is the thing that would carry you through the weeks the fire is out. That is written into the last line of a chapter about a room that was fully alive, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who produces self-control as fruit in a person, and He has never treated steadiness as the opposite of heat.

Now let me be careful, because I could hurt you here.

I am not telling you the two in the morning was flesh.

I have watched people spend a decade dismantling something God actually gave them, because somebody sensible got at them once, and they came out the other end tidy and useless. I am not doing that to you and I would not know how to live with myself.

The fire stays. All of it.

And I am not handing you a program, because a woman like you would take a program and run it into the ground in eleven days and then have one more failure to carry.

Here is the only thing I am saying, and it is your mother's whole life in one line.

Order is not the opposite of fire. It is the floor the fire stands on.

Your mother is not less than you. She has been reaching more people than you for forty years, at a lower temperature, because she built something that runs when she is empty and yours does not.

That is not a criticism of your temperature. It is an accounting of your reach.

And here is the part that actually stings: the flat weeks are not your off weeks. They are most of a life. Everybody's. The two in the morning is real and it is rare, and a faith with nothing in it for the ordinary Tuesday is a faith that is unavailable most of the time to most of the people who need it.

The word says His mercies are new every morning, which is a sentence about a supply that does not depend on the state of the one receiving it. And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness and prays in us when we do not know what to pray, and that is a description of somebody doing the work while you have nothing.

There is a reason this tradition has a Tuesday in it. It wrote down its forms and its orders and its sequence, and people have mocked it for that for centuries, and the point of every bit of it was this: so that a church could still function on the week nobody in it felt anything. Not to replace the fire. To be there when the fire is low, which is most weeks, which is the ordinary condition of ordinary people.