You Told Them It Worked

He did not lie exactly, and that is what has made it impossible to put down.

The whole family had been praying. Everybody. His mother, his aunts, the cousins in three countries on a group message, and the older women in that house had gone without on his behalf without anybody being asked to, which is how it is done where he comes from.

And it did not go the way they were all hoping.

He came back and his mother looked at him across the courtyard with her whole face open, and he heard himself say that things were much better. Which was true about one small part of it, and not true about the thing everybody had been praying about, and he watched her hands come together and he watched her thank God out loud, and he let it stand.

That was fourteen months ago. It has never been corrected. There is now a version of his life living in his family that he checks against before he speaks, and he has become fluent in it, and it is exhausting in a way he could not describe to anybody.

He is not a dishonest man. He would tell you he did it to protect them, and that is genuinely most of it. There is a smaller part underneath that he is less proud of, which is that he could not bear to be the one who came back with nothing after all those women had gone without.

And a cousin said last week, without any idea: God is good, no? You should fast again for the rest of it.

He said yes. Of course he did. And what he felt was not hope. It was the weight of the story getting one story higher.

If there is a version of your life that you check against before you speak, come and sit down at this table. Nobody here is going to make you say anything out loud.

Nobody is going to call you a liar

Let us settle it first, because it has been sitting on you for fourteen months.

What happened in that courtyard was not the act of a deceitful man. It was the act of a son looking at his mother's face and doing arithmetic in half a second and choosing her over himself. That is not the same as deceit. It has consequences, and it has cost you something, and it was not wickedness.

You are not condemned for it, and you were never once judged for the half second. That is not a soft opening. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who was standing in that courtyard and saw exactly what happened in you before you spoke, which was love with nowhere to go.

And no page here will tell you why the thing did not move. Nobody knows why. Anybody who says they do is guessing and calling it faith.

The place God wants the truth first

There is a line in a psalm written by a man in serious trouble, and it names precisely where truth belongs before it belongs anywhere else.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.Psalm 51:6

Read where he puts it. In the inward parts. In the hidden part.

He is not talking about a public statement. He is talking about the place inside a person where they hold what is actually true, and God's desire is aimed there first, before anything gets announced to anybody.

So the beginning of this is not a family meeting. It is one man, alone, saying the true sentence to God, and that costs nobody anything and rescues nothing from your mother's hands.

You are wanted honest with Him first, and that is a small enough door to walk through tonight. I am not saying it to spare you a difficult conversation later: it is what the psalm actually asks for, in the hidden part (Psalm 51:6), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes that a place to start rather than a demand.

And what those women went without bought nothing

Here is a thing that needs saying plainly, and it may be the sentence you most need on this page.

Their going without did not fail. It was never a mechanism, so failure was not available to it. It did not fall short and it was not spoiled by anything and it did not nearly work. They did not do it wrongly and neither did you, and the outcome is not a report on anybody's faith. 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 means He is not a device that yields when it is operated correctly, and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight lifting rather than a point in a debate.

You are not carrying a house full of wasted effort. There was no transaction to waste.

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 them. If anybody in that family lives with diabetes, is pregnant or nursing, takes medication, has ever had a hard relationship with eating, is underweight, unwell, elderly or simply unsure, they should speak to their doctor before going without anything, and let that 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 a household 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 telephone somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.