Twice Have I Heard This

She has a particular fear and it is not the one people would guess.

She is not afraid God is silent. She is afraid He has not been, and that she has been too busy to catch it, and that there is a quantity of things said to her over about twenty years that went past unheard while she was doing something.

It is a very specific worry and it has a very specific shape. It is not guilt exactly. It is more like the feeling of coming home to a full answerphone that has already deleted itself.

She runs a house with a great deal in it. Her mother lives with them. There are two at home and one who comes back at weekends with a dog. She is up first and down last and the day has no seams in it anywhere.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She has begun to think of herself as a woman with a backlog. Things God said, in her thirties and forties, that she was busy for, that are gone now, and that would have changed something.

The psalmist reports hearing it twice

There is a short line in the sixty second psalm that is easy to read past and is enormously reassuring once it lands.

God hath spoken once; twice have I heard this; that power belongeth unto God.Psalm 62:11

Read the arithmetic in it. God spoke once. The man heard it twice.

Whatever else is going on in that phrasing, the plain shape of it is that the saying and the hearing are not one to one, and that a thing said by God has a way of arriving more than once in a person.

And notice where this psalm sits. It is written by a man surrounded by people trying to bring him down, in the middle of pressure and noise and a great deal of talk. He is not describing a quiet retreat. He is a man in trouble reporting that something got through, twice.

You are not a woman with a backlog, and the God who speaks has a habit of saying a thing more than once. That is what the word actually reports, not a comfort I am inventing, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying that to a woman who is up first and down last.

He is not a single broadcast

Now let me deal with the picture underneath the fear, because the fear is entirely reasonable if the picture is right.

You've been imagining a transmission. Something goes out at a particular moment, and if the receiver is occupied at that moment it is gone, and there is no repeat, and the loss is permanent.

That is how a radio works and it is not how He works.

Look at how the book actually goes. Elijah is called more than once. Samuel is called four times in one night. Peter is told the same thing three times on a rooftop and again on a beach. Jonah gets the word a second time. Paul is corrected on the same point more than once. Almost nobody in Scripture gets a single unrepeated broadcast and then a permanent silence.

And nothing has been permanently lost while you were carrying a household. Scripture is full of second and third and fourth callings, and the Holy Spirit is not a single transmission that has already gone out.

Do not tidy the moment first

Here is the practical thing, and it has an instruction attached that most people ignore.

Pick a recurring noisy moment this week and make it the place. The breakfast. The half hour with your mother. The drive back from the weekend drop off.

And do not tidy it first.

That is the instruction, and it is for you specifically, because a woman like you will convert this into a small project: get the kitchen straight, get everybody settled, and then listen properly in the resulting five minutes. That is the same waiting in miniature.

Listen in it while it is going. Untidy. Mid sentence.

You are able to receive in an unimproved moment, and the moment has never once needed to be prepared. He promised to be found by those who seek Him, and the Holy Spirit is the One who meets a woman with a teapot in her hand.