You Have Been Carried And Did Not Know

Somebody asked him to give thanks at a table and he could not think of one thing about himself.

It was a small gathering, eight people, and the man hosting said would you say something for us, meaning grace, meaning nothing more than that. And he began, in his ordinary way, and gave thanks for the food and the house and the people round that table by name, and then came to the part where a person usually says something about their own year.

And there was nothing there.

He got through it. Nobody noticed anything and it was a good evening. But he drove home and thought about it, and the shape of the thought was this: if somebody had asked me to name one time in the last nine years when I was carried, I could not have produced one.

He is not in despair about that and it is important to say so. He is not a man who thinks God has abandoned him and he would argue against anybody who said such a thing. He simply has no data.

He can produce three hundred instances of carrying other people. He can tell you where he was standing. He can tell you the weather.

For himself there is nothing. There is no moment. There has been no evening in nine years where he felt a hand under him, and he has looked, and he has stopped looking, and what has grown in the empty space is not bitterness but something flatter: a working assumption that this is simply how it is for people in his position, that the covering is theoretical, and that he is expected to be all right with that and mostly is.

Then in the spring somebody asked him about the year his father died, which was also the year of the split, which was also the year his youngest was ill.

And he started to describe it, and about two minutes in he stopped, because he heard what he was saying and it did not make sense.

Nobody gets across a year like that. He had described the terrain, out loud, to another person, and it was terrain nobody walks over on their own, and he had walked over it and he was sitting in a chair nine years later describing it.

The evidence is in the road

Let me say at the top what this is and hold to it.

There is nothing at the end of this for you to do. No practice, nothing to look for, nobody to tell. If a line of it turns into an assignment then it has failed and you should let it go. You are being handed something and asked for nothing.

Now. Moses is at the end of his life, standing in front of a nation, going back over the whole road they came by, and he says this.

And in the wilderness, where thou hast seen how that the LORD thy God bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went, until ye came into this place.Deuteronomy 1:31

Look at the verb he uses about their perception. Thou hast seen.

Not thou hast felt. Not you were aware at the time. Seen, in the past tense, at the end, looking back, standing on the other side of the country you crossed.

And then look at what he asks them to look at. Not moments. Not a list of times God intervened, which he could easily have given them and does not. He points at the way ye went. The road. The terrain. The whole distance from there to here.

That is the evidence he offers a nation for the fact that they were carried: not a set of sensations, but the fact that they got across.

So hear this, driving home from a supper: the absence of a moment you can point to is not the absence of a carrying. That is not my consolation; it is how His word tells a whole nation to see the thing after the fact, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a look backward over hard ground and turns it into a floor under a man in a car.

Now take the year you tried to describe in the spring.

You stopped two minutes in because you heard yourself. That is worth sitting with, because that was not an emotional moment, it was an arithmetical one. You were setting out terrain, plainly, to another person, and part of you did the sum and could not make it work.

Nobody walks over that ground alone. You know that. You would say it, without hesitating, to anybody in your care who described a year like that to you: somebody was under you.

You have simply never once said it about yourself, because you were looking for a hand and not for a road.

And here is the shape of it. As a man doth bear his son. That image is not a rescue at a dramatic moment. A father carrying a small child does it for miles, at ordinary times, on flat ground as well as steep, and the child is very often asleep for most of it and does not remember a step.

Not remembering is not evidence of not being carried. That is nearly the definition of being carried by somebody you trust.

You were held through nine years you have no memory of being held in. Scripture puts the seeing at the end and the bearing all the way along, and the Holy Spirit has been the one under a man who has spent those years assuming that the covering was theoretical.