What It Felt Like at Sixteen

There is a photograph of the field and she has looked at it more times than is good for anybody.

Last night of camp, and they had done the thing they do at the end, and about a hundred and forty of them had walked out onto the grass in the dark, and somebody had a guitar, and the sky over that part of the country in July does what it does.

She was sixteen. And what happened in her, standing on that grass, is the single largest thing that has ever happened in her, and she has never had adequate words for it and has stopped trying to find them.

She told God, out on that grass, that she was His and that she would not go anywhere else. She meant it with an intensity that she now finds slightly frightening to remember.

She went somewhere else at about nineteen. Not dramatically. Just off, the way a person drifts off, and then a decade of an ordinary life.

She is thirty four now and here is her position, which she has never stated to anybody in these words: she is not going back until she can feel that again. Not because she is being difficult. Because to walk into a room and say the words with none of that in her would be, in her judgment, a lie. That night was the real thing. Anything that does not feel like that is not the real thing, and she is not going to counterfeit the largest experience of her life.

So she waits. She has waited eighteen years. She has been to three services in that time and left all three early, because nothing happened.

You may be waiting for a repeat. There may be a field, or a service, or a night in a hospital corridor, or a week when everything was lit from inside, and you may have quietly made that the standard, and you may have been standing outside a door for years because the standard has not been met.

Two ways of getting through a room

Let me put a very short verse in front of you, and it is short enough that everybody has heard it and nobody has looked at it.

Paul is talking about living in a body while belonging somewhere else, and he drops a sentence that describes the entire method.

For we walk by faith, not by sight.2 Corinthians 5:7

You are able to walk on ground you cannot feel underneath you, because that is the only way anybody crosses it. 2 Corinthians 5:7 sets faith against sight rather than against doubt, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying you at this temperature.

Not by sight

Notice he is not contrasting faith with doubt. He is contrasting it with sight.

Sight is the whole apparatus of evidence available to the senses: seeing, feeling, the internal weather, the thing you had in the field. Paul is not saying that apparatus is bad. He is saying it is not the mode of transport.

Walk by is a transport phrase. It is about what actually moves you across ground. And he is telling a church that the thing that moves a believer forward is faith, which is to say a settled reliance on something true, and not the readings on the instrument panel.

You are able to walk on ground you cannot feel underneath you, because that is the only way anybody has ever crossed it. 2 Corinthians 5:7 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page and stands it beside a woman looking at a photograph of a field.

Now let me deal with the honest objection, because you have one and it is a good one.

You are not asking for goosebumps. You are asking not to be a liar. If you go into a room and say I am His and there is nothing in you when you say it, that feels like perjury, and you would rather stay outside than perjure yourself, and I want to say clearly that the instinct behind that is a good instinct.

But look at what you have done with it. You have made your own internal weather the thing that determines whether a statement is true. Which means that on a Tuesday when you feel warm toward God, it is true that you are His, and on a Thursday when you feel nothing, it is not.

That is not integrity. That is a doctrine of yourself in which the truth about you changes with your chemistry.

You are His at every temperature, and that was never a fact your feelings were reporting on. Scripture puts the walking on faith and takes it explicitly off sight, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been keeping that true through eighteen years of nothing.

What that night actually was

And now let me say something about the field, because I am not going to take it off you or explain it away, and a good deal of preaching on this subject does exactly that.

It was real. God was there. Something was given to a sixteen year old on grass in the dark and it was not manufactured by a guitar and a summer sky, whatever a cynic would say.

It was also a gift, and a gift is not a fee schedule. It was given once, freely, without you asking for it or being able to produce it, and the whole nature of it means that you cannot now use it as a threshold. Nobody can produce a gift on demand. That is what makes it a gift and not a wage.

You were given something you could never generate, and you have been treating it as an entry requirement ever since. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is what walking by faith and not by sight means in practice, and His Spirit has been the one carrying you through eighteen years at a temperature you would not have chosen.

I am not going to promise you that the feeling comes back. This site does not promise the current; it flips the switch and leaves the current to God. It may come back. It may never come back in that form and you may find, at sixty, that you had something quieter and more useful instead. Neither of those is mine to hand you.

What I can tell you is that the door is not waiting on it.