You Stopped Trading And You Never Decided To

He caught it at the fence line, which is where he catches most things, and it stopped him for a minute.

He had said his piece about the matter, the way he does. Same place, same words more or less, and he was already thinking about the wire and the gate.

And walking back it occurred to him that he had not offered anything.

For years there was an offer in it. Not crude, and he would not have called it a bargain if you had asked him, and it was there all the same: some version of Lord, You do this and here is what I will do. He had a list of things he was prepared to put up. He had revised the list over time, which tells you what it was.

He could not tell you the month it stopped. There was no evening where he decided that trading was wrong. It has simply not been in the praying for a while, and nobody has ever mentioned it, and he has not mentioned it to himself either until this afternoon.

The matter is exactly where it was. He wants that stated plainly before anybody gets carried away, and he has a fair amount of experience of people getting carried away.

And a man at church said last month, meaning well: have another go at fasting over it.

He said he would think on it. And what he thought, at the post, was a plain question: what have I been assuming has not happened?

If the deal making has gone out of your praying and you never noticed, come and sit on a bale here.

Nobody is telling you the matter moved

Let us settle that in the first minute, because you will walk off otherwise, and you would be right to.

The matter is where it was. Nothing here reinterprets it and nothing here is going to suggest that if you looked at it properly you would see progress. That is asking a man to argue with his own field, and it is not what is happening here.

You are not being talked round, and your account of it has been accurate the whole time. That is not a soft word said to a man leaning on a fence. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been out in that field through the whole of it, and He has never once asked you to see a thing that is not there.

There is a second field, that is all. Nobody has walked it.

Where God said He would do the writing

There is a promise in Jeremiah about a new arrangement, and the location it names is the thing to notice.

But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.Jeremiah 31:33

Read where the writing happens. In their inward parts. In their hearts.

Not on a wall where a man can check it. Not in a book where he can watch the ink go on. Inside, which is precisely where a person cannot observe anything happening to himself.

And notice who holds the pen. I will put. I will write. Both of those verbs are God's, and the person in the sentence is the surface being written on rather than the one doing the work.

You are being written on in a place where nobody can watch it happen. I am not saying it to make a man feel better about an unmoved field: it is where the verse puts the work and whose verbs they are (Jeremiah 31:33), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who is doing the writing, which is why a thing can go out of a man's praying without any evening where he decided it.

And this is not a sign about the year ahead

Here is the thing that gets said plain, because this is exactly where a piece like this normally spoils itself.

What you caught at the post is not a signal. It does not mean the matter is about to turn, it is not the first of anything, and it tells you nothing whatsoever about next spring.

You are carrying no forecast, and nobody here knows what comes next. Scripture says it is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power (Acts 1:7), and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief rather than a disappointment, because the minute a small true thing becomes evidence about the future it stops being yours and turns into a bet.

And what you went without over those years bought nothing, in either direction. It did not fail and it did not quietly succeed inside you instead. There was no trade anywhere in it.

Now the thing this site says on every page. Some folks must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing off you. Diabetes, medication, any hard road with eating, being underweight, unwell, older or simply not sure: talk to your doctor and let what they say be the answer. You are not one step further from God on account of a doctor's advice. The word 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 a man because of his body.

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