It Stopped Feeling Like Faith

He opens the same book at the same hour at the same place and there is nothing whatsoever going on inside him, and he reads it anyway, and he has for a long time.

Ten past five in the morning. The chair. The lamp. The blanket over the back of the chair that is there because of one cold winter about six years ago and has never been put away. Outside, one van going somewhere, and then nothing for a while.

Fourteen years of this hour.

It started in a bad stretch. That is the honest account of it: he did not take up a practice out of devotion, he took it up because a man in that state needs somewhere to put himself at five in the morning, and this was the somewhere.

And it worked, in the way those things work. The bad stretch passed. The hour stayed.

Now he is fifty six and the hour is simply the hour. He gets up. He puts the small light on so as not to wake anybody. He opens it at where he is. He reads. He sits for a while afterward, though he could not tell you what for.

And what he has been thinking for about two years, and has never said to a living soul, including two men he would trust with anything, is this:

This stopped being faith a long time ago. This is a habit I cannot break.

He is not distressed about it. That is almost the worst part. It is a flat observation about himself, made most mornings, in a chair, at ten past five, in a house where everybody else is asleep.

That is you, and your hour might be a walk, a drive, a page you read, a prayer you say at the same point in the same day and have said so many times you no longer hear the words.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to keep sitting there and taking it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

And I am not going to rally you. That has been tried on you and at fourteen years it produces nothing at all. I am not going to tell you a feeling is coming back either, because I do not know that.

The psalm says the word twice and puts something between

There is a short verse at the end of a psalm, and its shape is worth looking at before its content.

Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.Psalm 27:14

He says wait on the LORD, then a clause, then wait, I say, on the LORD.

The repetition is not decoration and it is not emphasis in the way a modern writer would use it. It is what somebody does when the thing they are asking for is long. Nobody repeats an instruction that takes a minute.

And notice what sits between the two instances: he shall strengthen thine heart. That is not something the waiting person does. It is not the result of waiting well. It is what is happening in the middle of the waiting, done by somebody else, to a heart, while a man sits in a chair.

That is the whole architecture of the verse and it is not what most of us were taught. We were taught that waiting is a test and the strengthening is the reward. What the verse actually has is a long assignment with somebody working on you inside it.

You are having something done to you in the middle of the waiting, and it has been going on for fourteen years. That is not a lift for a man at ten past five: Psalm 27:14 puts the strengthening between the two instructions and makes God the one doing it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an invisible thing real in a body that feels nothing at all rather than the devotion anybody can produce before dawn.

A habit you cannot break and a faith you cannot lose

Now the sentence he has been saying to himself for two years, and it needs answering exactly.

This stopped being faith. This is a habit I cannot break.

Take the second half first, because it is doing something he has not noticed. He says cannot break as though it were an indictment. But look at what he is describing: fourteen years, a bad stretch that ended, no feeling for a long time, and he is still there at ten past five in a chair in a dark house.

There is a word for a thing a man does for fourteen years without any feeling and without any external reward and without anybody knowing. It is not habit. Habit is what we call it when we want to give ourselves no credit, and it is exactly the word a man reaches for at fifty six when he has stopped feeling anything.

And the first half, that it stopped being faith: faith in Scripture is not a temperature. It is not once described as a feeling anybody monitors. It is described, over and over, as somebody continuing to hold on to a thing, usually in the dark, usually without evidence, frequently for years.

By that description he has not lost faith. He is doing it right now, in a chair, at ten past five, and calling it a habit because nothing in him is moving while he does it.

You have not lost anything, and the word you have been using for yourself is the wrong one. The written word never once measures faith by what a person feels and describes it constantly as continuing, and the Spirit of God has been strengthening a heart in that chair for fourteen years, never the devotion anybody can locate before dawn.

And nobody is asking you for one more push. The instruction attached to the whole armor is stand, four times in six verses and no fifth verb, and a man opening a book at ten past five with nothing going on inside him is that verb sitting in a chair.

You are standing, and standing was always the assignment. Scripture calls a person who is still there at the end of it standing, and His Spirit is what has had a man in that hour every morning for fourteen years.