The Unremarkable Middle

Nothing is wrong. That is what makes it so hard to talk about.

She is thirty nine. She has been a believer since she was seventeen and there has been no crisis, no season of doubt that she could dramatize, no falling away and coming back, and equally no mountain, no astonishing answer, nothing she would stand up and say.

She reads a bit. Not as much as she means to. She goes most weeks. She prays in the car and in the bath and occasionally at three in the morning when she cannot sleep, and she would say all of that is real.

It is just that she has no idea whether anything is happening.

She said it best to a friend in April, and the friend did not have an answer, which was fine. She said: "If somebody told me I had not moved an inch in eight years, I would not be able to argue."

That is the exact problem. Not despair. Not doubt. The complete absence of instrumentation.

Because the things she was taught to look for are not there. No dramatic answers to point at. No besetting sin conquered on a particular Tuesday, since her particular struggles are the low grade kind that do not resolve in an evening. No new gift, no calling, nothing she could put in a testimony slot without embarrassing herself.

Eight years of what she has started, privately, to call the middle.

He knoweth not how

Jesus tells a very short parable about a farmer that almost nobody preaches, probably because there is nothing to do with it, which is the point.

And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.Mark 4:27

Take that on the walk. You are growing by a mechanism nobody was given a window onto. The word says the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how, and it is the Holy Spirit who works under the ground where He has always worked.

He knoweth not how.

That is not a criticism of the farmer. It is not a gap in his knowledge that better farming would close. It is stated as the ordinary condition of the arrangement: seed goes in, time passes, the man sleeps and gets up and sleeps and gets up, and growth happens by a mechanism he does not have access to.

And then the next verse gives the sequence: first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. Which means there are long stretches where the correct and healthy thing for a field to look like is: green, and unremarkable, and exactly the same as last week.

So take this where you are, and know it is not my consolation, it is what is written: the growing is happening by a mechanism you were never given a window onto. His word says the seed springs and grows up, he knoweth not how, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the mechanism, and not knowing how is written into the parable as normal rather than as a failure.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who taught that a believer goes on, and he is usually quoted by people who want to talk about dramatic holiness.

Read his journals and the striking thing is how unremarkable most of them are.

Rode to a town. Preached. Weather. Read a book on the horse. Wrote a letter. A note about somebody's health. Occasionally, and this is what people quote, something extraordinary. Mostly: the ordinary machinery of a long obedient life, repeated for fifty years.

And the instrument he built for people in exactly your position was a room. Six people, weekly, asked out loud how it stood with them.

Not because the answers would be dramatic. Because a person on their own has no instrumentation at all, and six months of somebody else hearing you every week produces something you cannot produce for yourself: another person saying, you sound different from March.

The name that got attached to those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method was mostly there for the middle.