The Conclusion You Came To Quietly

He did not decide it. It arrived, the way a conclusion does when nobody is looking, and by the time he noticed it, it had been living in the house for a while.

Here is the shape of it. God does things. He believes that entirely and he could give you a dozen examples from that congregation alone, because he has been in it for nineteen years and he has watched things move. He has stood in the row behind people while they wept about an answer.

And somewhere underneath, quietly, without ceremony, he has concluded: not for me.

He would never say that out loud. He is not a bitter man and he would be genuinely appalled at how that sounds. What he would say, if pressed, is something about God's sovereignty, and he would mean it, and it would be true, and it would not be the thing sitting in his chest at half past five in the morning.

He did the thing. That is the part that made the conclusion possible. He went without for that specific matter, twice, and he did it with everything he had and told nobody, and afterwards it was exactly where it had always been. And he has never once said out loud what those two attempts did to him.

And a man he loves, a good man, said over coffee last week: have another go at fasting over it.

He said he might. And what moved in him was not hope. It was the conclusion, sitting up, and saying quietly: we have done this.

If a conclusion has moved into your house without asking, come and sit down at the table here.

No argument is coming

Let us get that clear before anything else, because otherwise you will spend the whole page braced for a correction.

Nothing here is going to argue you out of it. I am not going to tell you that you are wrong to feel it, or that you have not noticed the answers you did get, or that you are being unfair to God. Those things might be true and they are not what a man at half past five needs handed to him.

You are not in trouble for the conclusion, and it has not put you outside anything. That is not a soft opening. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been in that kitchen at half past five and has never once been shocked by what is sitting in your chest.

And no page here is going to tell you why. Nobody knows why, and anybody who says they do is guessing and calling it faith.

A man in Scripture arrived at your exact sentence

There is a psalm where the writer gets there before you did, and he does not hide it.

Is his mercy clean gone for ever? doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious?Psalm 77:8

Those are questions with real teeth in them, asked out loud, kept in the songbook, given to a congregation.

And look what he does next. He does not talk himself out of it and he does not receive an answer. He turns to memory.

And I said, This is my infirmity: but I will remember the years of the right hand of the most High.Psalm 77:10

He calls his own state what it is, without pretending, and then he deliberately puts his mind on what God has actually done, not to disprove his feelings but to stand somewhere while he has them.

You are allowed to be exactly where he was, and it does not cost you your place. I am not saying that to make a hard morning easier: it is what the psalm does out loud in front of everybody (Psalm 77:9), and it is His Spirit, not this paragraph, who makes memory something that holds weight rather than a distraction from the truth.

And what you went without bought nothing

Here is a thing that needs saying flatly, because the conclusion has been feeding on it.

Twice you went without, and it was not a mechanism, so it did not fail. There was no length it fell short of. There was no purity of motive it lacked. It did not almost work.

You did not do it wrongly, and the outcome is not a report on you. Scripture is blunt that God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent (Numbers 23:19), which also means He is not a device that produces a result when operated correctly, and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight coming off rather than a point in a debate.

Nobody here will promise you it will work next time. You would not believe it and it would not be honest.

Now something said in the open rather than in fine print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a way around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.