I Knew What Was Supposed To Happen

He had a page of notes. Not for anybody else. For himself, folded into quarters, in the inside pocket of the coat he did not wear into the water.

He is that sort of man. He had spent eleven months on it, and by the end he could have given you the Greek, the first-century practice, the three main positions and their strongest advocates, and a fairly detailed account of what different traditions expect a person to experience and why they expect it.

And on the page, in his own small handwriting, he had written down what he was expecting.

He is not embarrassed about the page, exactly. He would say it was diligence. But he has never told anybody it existed, which tells you something, and he still has it, which tells you more.

The morning was a good morning. It was cold and bright and there were eleven people and one of them brought a thermos.

He went under, and he came up, and what he experienced was: water, and the very strong sensation of water going up his nose, and a moment of the specific embarrassment of being a large adult man being helped up by two smaller people, and then the towel, and then a considerable relief that it was over.

And none of what was on the page.

Not one item. He is precise about that because he is a precise man. He got home that afternoon and he took the page out of the coat pocket and he read it, and he did not tear it up, and he has never once been able to say to anybody what he felt in that moment, because the honest word for it is disappointed, and it seems like an appalling thing to be about God.

He is fifty-eight now. That was thirteen years ago.

He still studies. He still teaches, and he is good, and there are people who drive some distance to sit in that room. But he has never resolved the page, and what has happened instead, quietly, over thirteen years, is that he has stopped expecting anything of God experientially at all, and has come to call that maturity.

The one thing you could not have read ahead

I want to say something about the page first, and it is not what you expect.

The page was not the problem, and neither was the diligence. Eleven months of serious study before a serious step is not a fault, and I am not going to stand here and tell a man who reads Greek that he should have read less.

The problem is a category error, and it is one that only careful people make. You had built, from good sources, an accurate description of what has often happened. And then, without noticing the move, you had treated that description as a specification.

Descriptions are backward-looking. They tell you what has been. A specification is forward-looking and binding, and God has never issued one for this.

Here is the sentence I want to put on the page beside your own handwriting.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.John 3:8

That is Jesus speaking to the most educated man in the story. Nicodemus is a teacher of Israel, and he has come at night with good questions, and this is the answer he gets.

Canst not tell whence it cometh. Jesus is not being evasive. He is telling a scholar, kindly, that the thing under discussion does not file a route in advance, and that the inability to predict it is a property of the thing rather than a gap in the scholarship.

You are born of the Spirit and the Spirit does not publish His itinerary, and that is not my consolation for a disappointed man, it is what Jesus said to a man very like you, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the page rather than on your exegesis of John 3, which is doubtless better than mine.

Now let me say the harder thing, because I think you can take it and I think you would rather have it.

You called the disappointment appalling. It was not appalling. It was honest, and it was the last piece of genuine expectation you have permitted yourself in thirteen years, and the fact that you buried it rather than brought it anywhere is the actual injury here.

And then you did something a careful man does. You reorganized your theology so that the disappointment could not recur, and you called it maturity.

You are allowed to expect things of God. Scripture is full of people doing it, and it is not a lower form of faith than the settled and unsurprised thing you have built, and the Spirit of God who has been in you since that cold bright morning is not honored by a man who has stopped asking Him for anything he could not predict.

I want to say one more thing, about the eleven people and the thermos.

You have thirteen years of memory of that morning and it consists of water up the nose, embarrassment, a towel, and relief. Read that list again. It is a list of a real body in real cold water on a real morning with real people.

You were there and He was there and it was not nothing, and the word says the wind blows where it wills, and the Spirit was doing what He does in a register that your page could not have described in advance, and a man who cannot tell whence it comes is exactly the person Jesus said would be born of it.

You are born of the Spirit, and the Spirit does not file His route in advance. Jesus said the wind blows where it wills and Scripture kept the sentence for exactly this, and the Holy Spirit has been in you since that cold bright morning by the trough.