She Saw It and I Could Not

They always get the booth by the window if it is free, and today it is free.

Forty one years of these lunches. Long enough that they no longer look at the menus, long enough that the waitress knows one of them takes her coffee black and the other one takes about half the little pitcher. There is a wedge of coconut pie between them with two forks in it, because neither of them will order a whole one and both of them want some.

The check is face down by the sugar packets and neither of them has reached for it.

Then her friend pushes her reading glasses up into her hair, the way she has done since they were twenty two, and says it.

You know you are not the same woman you were. You used to go stiff when somebody crossed you. You do not do that anymore. I have watched you not do it three times this year.

And the woman in the booth laughs. She says something about how her memory is going and that is all it is. She picks up the check to have somewhere to put her hands. Her friend lets it go, because forty one years teaches you when to let a thing go, and they talk about the pie instead.

But out in the parking lot the sentence is still sitting there.

She drives home with the radio off. Twenty two minutes on the highway and she spends every one of them going through the file, looking for the evidence, and she cannot find it. She can find last Tuesday, when she was short with the girl at the pharmacy counter. She can find the thing she said to her son at Easter. She can find a whole shelf of that, filed and labeled and easy to reach.

What she cannot find is one single thing that would hold up as proof of what her oldest friend just said to her face across a plate of pie.

Thirty five years of following Jesus. And if somebody stopped her at the exit ramp and asked her to name what is different about her now, she would sit there in the turn lane with her hands on the wheel and nothing to say.

Maybe that is your drive home too. Somebody said a kind thing about you and you went straight to the file to check it, and the file came up short, and you have been quietly carrying that ever since.

The one person who cannot see it is standing inside it

Let me start with the plain mechanical fact, because it takes a great deal of weight off a person.

The worst placed observer of your own life is you. Not because something is wrong with you, but because of where you happen to stand. Nobody sees their own face except in a mirror or a photograph, both of which lie a little, and nobody sees their own change except through somebody else's eyes or over an awfully long stretch of road.

Your friend has an advantage you can never have. She has gaps. She goes months without seeing you, and the gap is exactly what makes the difference visible, the way a person who moves away and comes back sees how much a town has changed while the people who stayed saw nothing.

The word says we are His workmanship, made in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit of God is the one doing the making, so it was never your job to inspect the work. You are somebody else's handiwork, and the maker does not hand the inspection over to the material.

And notice what your file is full of. Failures, every one indexed. You know exactly which Tuesday and exactly what you said at Easter. That file is not evidence about your life. It is evidence about what you were trained to write down.

It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and His Spirit is not scandalized by a file kept the way yours is kept. You have a memory trained to hold the failures and let the rest go by, and that training is never a witness against you.

Job could not see it either, and he said so out loud

Here is the thing that ought to settle you a little. The complaint you drove home with is in the Bible, and it is not in the mouth of somebody backslidden. It is in the mouth of the man God Himself called upright.

Job says he goes forward and God is not there. Backward, and he cannot perceive Him. Left hand where He works, and he cannot behold Him. Right hand, and nothing. Four directions, and nothing in any of them. That is a man taking a full inventory and coming up empty, and the next thing out of his mouth is this.

But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.Job 23:10

Read where the knowing sits in that sentence. Not in Job. In God. Job cannot see the work, cannot find the worker, cannot produce one item of evidence, and he says the knowing is happening anyway, over there, in hands that are not his. You are known all the way down by the One doing the work, and He has never once required you to corroborate Him. That is what is written, and it is the Spirit and not your recall who makes it hold at seventy miles an hour with the radio off.

Gold is worth a minute here too. The refiner is not standing over the crucible asking the metal for a progress report. The metal has no idea what is happening to it. All the metal knows is heat.

You have been in hands that know exactly what they are doing, straight through the years that felt like nothing but heat. Job 23:10 says the trying and the coming forth both belong to Him, and the Spirit who kept Job company in the dark has not changed His way of working since.

A short list is not a bad sign

Now let me take one thing off the table before it settles on you, because I can feel it coming.

There is no scoring here. Not from God, not from this page, and not from a friend in a booth who loves you. If you sat down tonight and could name three things, that is not a grade. If you could name none, that is not a grade either. The list was never the point, and a short list has never once meant a small work. Underground is where most of the growing happens, and root systems do not send reports up to the leaves.

Nobody is going to hand you a chart, and nobody here is going to raise the question of whether the work is real or whether you are truly His. That question is settled and it is not on this table. The only thing in front of us is a woman with an empty legal pad, and an empty pad is not a verdict.

You are held inside a work that started before you could have noticed it starting, and it does not slow down when you fail to notice it continuing. It is written that He which began a good work in you will perform it, and the Spirit of God is the one carrying it, which is why the pad can stay empty and the work goes on regardless.

Now, one thing said plainly, because for some of us this drive home is darker than it looks from outside. If turning that file over has stopped being an occasional Thursday and has become the shape of every night, get a person into it with you. Helping hands are how God has always moved, and asking for them is never stepping around Him. A doctor, because thyroid and sleep and plain grief all wear this same coat. A counselor who will take the whole file and not only the tidy page you show the group. Your pastor. And if the nights have started arguing that everybody would manage fine without you, call or text 988 rather than lying there, or the crisis line serving your area, and get a person near enough to pull the other chair out at your table. That is not off the subject. On this shelf it is very much the subject.

You were never left to do the noticing on your own, and you are not doing this evening on your own either. The word calls Him the God of all comfort, and the Spirit whom Jesus sent is named the one who comes alongside, which is a plain description of what He is for.