Ears That Were Never Broken

There was a year. She would not tell you which one, and it does not matter for this.

Before it, she heard things. Not dramatically. But there were mornings when a sentence arrived and it was not hers, and there was a period of about three years in her late twenties when she would have told you, without embarrassment, that God talked to her.

Then the year happened. And afterwards, nothing.

She has been careful about how she describes this, even in her own head. She does not say God stopped speaking, because that sounds like an accusation and she is not making one. She says something quieter and much worse.

She says something in her broke, and she has been the wrong kind of instrument ever since.

That is the actual belief. Not that He went away. That she was damaged in a way that took the receiving part out, the way a knock can take the picture off a television and leave the sound. And because it is a belief about herself rather than about Him, it has never once come up in a prayer, because you do not pray about a fact.

She is forty four. She serves. She turns up. She is one of the most reliable people in that building.

And she has assumed, for about nine years, that she is now somebody who works from memory.

The shortest sentence about hearing in the Gospels

There is a line Jesus says repeatedly, and its brevity is the whole point.

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.Matthew 11:15

Look at the assumption sitting inside it. He says it to crowds. Mixed crowds, in the open, with no vetting at the door: the sick, the skeptical, the people who had come for the spectacle, the ones who had been through terrible years and the ones who were about to.

And He says he that hath ears, which in that setting is not a filter. It is a description of everybody standing there.

He does not say he that has recovered. He does not say he that has kept his faith intact through everything. He does not add a clause excluding people whose worst year has already happened.

You have ears to hear, and that was never revoked by anything that was done to you or anything that happened. That is what the word plainly assumes about everybody in the crowd, not a reassurance I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One making that true for a woman nine years on.

What the year actually broke

Now let me be careful and slow, because this is the part that matters and it must not be rushed.

Something did break. I am not going to stand here and tell you it did not, and any message that told you the year was fine would be worthless to you and you would be right to close it.

But look at what actually broke, because I think the diagnosis was made in the dark by somebody in no state to make one.

What breaks in a year like that is expectation. The willingness to lean toward something and find out. The nerve it takes to ask a question you might not get an answer to, when the last big thing you asked about went the way it went.

That is not the same as the capacity to hear. It is upstream of it. A person who has stopped leaning toward will not notice a great deal, and will conclude, entirely reasonably, that nothing is being said.

And nothing about you was disqualified in that year, and the equipment was never what broke. Scripture assumes ears in an ordinary crowd of ordinary people who had all been through things, and the Holy Spirit is not working around a fault in you.

The diagnosis was never confirmed

Here is the thing I would love you to see, and it is quite plain once it is said.

That conclusion has never been tested.

You reached it in the aftermath of the worst year of your life, when you'd stopped eating properly and had nothing left, and you've carried it for nine years without once putting it in front of God, because you file it as a fact rather than a fear, and facts do not get prayed about.

Take it out of the fact drawer. Put it in the other one. It is a conclusion, made under pressure, by somebody in no condition to be issuing verdicts on herself.

You are able to hear Him, and the ability was never yours to lose. Scripture assumes it of the whole crowd without a single exception, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that plain to a woman who has been working from memory for nine years.

And a plain word, because we do not pretend here: if that year is still sitting on you, a person who does this properly is worth talking to, and going to one is not a lack of faith in any direction whatsoever.