She knows what comes next.
Not in a bitter way. She would like me to say that and I am glad to, because there is a bitter version of this woman and she is not her.
She simply knows. Three songs, the middle one slower. The notices, which will overrun by about a minute and a half. The prayer, which will be a good prayer and will use the phrase it always uses. Thirty-two minutes, give or take, and a shape she could draw in the air.
She has been there fourteen years. It has always been like this. It was like this in the years she loved it.
And that is the sentence that stops her every time, and it is why she has never said any of this out loud to anybody.
It was exactly like this in the years she loved it.
Nothing changed in the room. The shape did not get worse. Nobody stopped meaning it, and the man who prays the prayer means it as much as he ever did, and she knows that because she knows him.
So the change is in her, and she does not know what kind of change it is, and she has two candidates and neither is comfortable.
Either something has gone out of her. Or something has come into her that she has not been able to name and it is looking for room.
She has never let herself ask which, because both answers would ask something of her that she has not felt able to give.
So let me ask you.
Could you predict the next forty minutes with your eyes shut?
He was asked a question and he refused to answer it
There is a man standing in a valley of bones and it is one of the strangest scenes in Scripture, and the strangeness is in the dialogue rather than in what happens afterwards.
He is set down in the middle of it and led back and forth among them, and the text says they were very dry, which is a detail nobody had to include.
And then God asks him a question.
He asked me, Son of man, can these bones live? I said, Sovereign Lord, You alone know.Ezekiel 37:3
Now think about what he could have said.
He could have said no. That would have been the honest report of a man who had been walked up and down among them and had seen how dry they were, and nobody could have called it faithless. It is simply what bones are like.
He could have said yes. That would have sounded better and would have been the answer a person gives when they think a question is a test.
He says neither, and what he says is not a dodge, and God does not treat it as one.
Sovereign Lord, You alone know.
He hands the question back. He declines to be the one who rules on it, because he has correctly identified that the answer is not in his jurisdiction and never was, and that pretending otherwise in either direction would be a false report.
And that sentence is in the Bible as the right answer.
Hear where you stand, fourteen years into a shape you can draw in the air.
You are not a woman who has gone dry. Scripture gives the wisest answer in that valley to a man who refused to rule on whether life was possible, and the Spirit He poured out has never made a room's predictability into a statement about what He is doing in it.
And I want to name your two candidates, because you have been holding them for a long time without saying them.
You have been afraid it is either loss or hunger, and that both would cost you something.
They might both be true. That is the possibility you have not allowed, and it is the most likely one. A thing can go quiet in a person at exactly the same time as a thing starts moving in them, and from the inside those two feel identical, because both of them present as an absence.
The word says You alone know, and it says it about the question you have been trying not to ask.
And you are not a woman who has gone quiet on God. Ezekiel 37 gives the wisest answer in that valley to a man who refused to rule on whether life was possible, and the Spirit has never made a room's predictability into a statement about Himself.
So here is what changes, and it is a refusal rather than an effort.
Stop ruling on it.
You have been trying to work out what the quiet means, and the working out has been going on for long enough that it has become the main thing happening in you on a Sunday morning, and it will never conclude, because the answer is not in your jurisdiction.
Hand it back. In those words, or in your own.
Ezekiel says he answered Sovereign Lord, You alone know, and that is the sentence Scripture preserves as wisdom, from a man standing in the driest place in the book. The Holy Spirit who was poured out on everybody has not once made a predictable room into a verdict about Himself.
And ask there. In that seat, in that shape, in the room where you know exactly what comes next, because nothing in this article is sending you anywhere else and this house does not tell anybody to leave.
Fourteen years in one chair is not the problem. The problem was a question you were never qualified to answer.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you can hear yourself. Know what holds them up. This authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King. And you speak under His will, never over it. However He answers, and in whatever way He comes, the outcome is His.
- Predictability, you are a shape and you are not a diagnosis, and you were exactly the same shape in the years I loved it. Ezekiel 37 has a man in the driest place in the book saying Sovereign Lord, You alone know, and Scripture keeps that as the wise answer.
- Question about whether something has gone out of me or something has come into me, you have run fourteen years of Sunday mornings and you were never mine to settle. In the name of Jesus I hand you back, and the Spirit has never made a predictable room into a verdict about Himself.
- Lord, Ezekiel 37 keeps Sovereign Lord, You alone know as the wise answer from the driest place in the book, and Your Spirit has never made a predictable room into a verdict about Himself. I am staying in my seat for ten minutes while the room empties, and I am asking in the chair I have sat in for fourteen years.
Ezekiel 37:3
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