Arguing With God Since April

Nobody in that building knows that she has been arguing with God every night since the ninth of April.

They know the other thing. They know that when her name is read out for something people nod, and that the young mothers ask for her, and that at the prayer meeting she is the one who prays the prayer that makes the room go quiet.

What happens at about half past eleven, in the front room, with the lamp off, is not that. It is closer to a fight. It is the same three questions, asked with increasing precision, and no answer, and then eventually a kind of exhausted stopping rather than an amen.

The ninth of April is the date because that is the date of the phone call. She is not going to write down what the call was about.

And the thing that has hardened in her over five months is not doubt about whether He exists. It is worse and more specific: she has begun to suspect that she is not what those people think, that the woman at the prayer meeting is a residue of something rather than a present reality, and that if any of them heard the front room they would quietly take her off the list.

You know this. A thing is named in you publicly and there is a room in your house where the opposite has been going on for months.

Say what five months of that costs

Nobody has counted it, and somebody should.

It costs her sleep, obviously, but that is not the expensive part.

It costs her the prayer meeting, which she still attends and still leads and which she now leaves at speed, because standing about afterward means being thanked and being thanked has become difficult.

And it costs her the assumption she used to have that she and God were on ordinary terms. There is a wariness now that was not there before April, and it goes both ways in her imagination, and she has told nobody because who do you tell.

You have been in a fight nobody knows about, and God has never once treated the fight as a withdrawal. Psalm 62:8 says pour out your heart before Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes pour out off a page and puts it in a front room at half past eleven with the lamp off. The arguing is not happening at a distance from Him. It is happening with Him, which is a completely different location.

He wrestled all night, and nobody let go

There is one line built for a woman who has been at this since April.

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaks. And he said, I will not let you go, except you bless me.Genesis 32:26

Look at who is doing what. A man holds on all night to somebody far stronger than he is, and the holding on is not treated as insolence and is not rebuked. He is not told to stop. He is asked to let go, and he says no, and what he gets for that is a blessing and a new name and a limp.

That is the passage Scripture gives us about a long night that does not resolve, and it does not once suggest that the man was failing at faith, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a live description of a front room in September rather than an odd story about a ford.

You are wrestling rather than walking away, and the wrestling is a form of holding on rather than evidence against you. That is not a way of dressing up a crisis. The written word puts the man's refusal to let go at the center and calls the outcome a blessing, and the Spirit is the one who has been in that room every night since the ninth of April.

And I want to say the plain thing, because the wrong comfort would ruin it. The relief here is not that you really do have great faith and the arguing is a sign of it. Maybe it is not a sign of anything. The relief is that what those people see was never a supply of faith you were keeping, and a bad five months does not empty a jar you were not filling.

What they are actually seeing

There is a fear here that has to be said out loud.

The fear is that she is running on residue. That the woman at the prayer meeting is a memory of somebody who existed before April, that the fuel ran out months ago, and that what the room responds to is a shape rather than a substance.

You are not running on residue, and what comes out of you at that meeting is not manufactured by your good months. 2 Corinthians 4:7 says the treasure is in clay jars so that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us, and the same Spirit is the one who makes clay a description of the container rather than an assessment of what is in it.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the ninth of April is heavier than a hard phone call, if the nights have gone somewhere darker, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you tell anybody at that church. That is not the faith failing. That is God sending help with a face on it, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.