Waiting To Feel Ready At The Rail

She said it at the rail on a Sunday night, and she meant it with everything she had.

Lord, the moment I feel ready, I will do it.

She was not bargaining. That was not the spirit of it at all. She was a woman on her knees at the front of a church with tears on her face, saying a completely sincere sentence, and if you had been there you would have believed her, because she meant it.

That was three Octobers ago.

And she has kept every part of that promise except the part that requires the feeling, because the feeling has never come.

She has looked for it. She would tell you that plainly. She has watched for it in worship, in the good services, in the ones where the room lifted and she was as open as a person gets. She has watched for it in the car and in the kitchen and at three in the morning when God does some of His best work on her.

It has not come. Not once, not for a minute, not even a small version of it that she could have talked herself into calling enough.

What has come, more than once, is something else: a kind of dry certainty, a plain sense that it is right, sitting there with no warmth on it at all. She has kept setting that aside, because it did not feel like anything, and she has been waiting on a feeling.

And here is where she is now, at the same rail, three years on.

She is starting to think it is not coming.

Not in a bitter way. She is not angry with God about it. She just has enough evidence now, three years of it, and she is an honest woman, and honest women eventually look at their own evidence.

And if it is not coming, then either the thing does not happen, or the thing happens cold.

And you have been waiting to feel something too. You would recognize it if you named it. You have been waiting to feel sure, or willing, or peaceful, or brave, and it has been a long wait, and it has been quiet.

He was hiding in a winepress and he was called a mighty warrior

There is a man in Judges threshing wheat in a winepress, which is a detail worth sitting with, because a winepress is a hole in the ground and threshing needs wind and open air.

He is doing it in the wrong place on purpose. He is hiding. The enemy comes through and takes everything, year after year, and this man is down in a pit trying to get a little grain out without being seen.

That is who is standing there when the angel of the Lord arrives and says: the Lord is with you, mighty man of valor.

Read that again, because on any honest reading it is not a description of the man in front of him. It is a description of something else.

And when the man protests, which he does, at length, and reasonably, the answer is this.

And the Lord turned to him and said, "Go in this might of yours and save Israel from the hand of Midian; do not I send you?"Judges 6:14

Go in this might of yours.

What might. He is in a hole. The might in question is whatever a frightened man has on him while he is hiding, and that is what he is told to go in.

You are being sent with exactly what you have on you right now, at the temperature you are actually at, and no upgrade is being withheld from you until you qualify. It is written, go in this might of yours, do not I send you (Judges 6:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the sending, not the feeling, and makes it the thing that carries a person out of a pit.

Now let us deal honestly with the feeling, because three years is a long time to wait for one.

Nowhere in Scripture is a feeling named as the signal to obey. Not once. Fear is all over the accounts of people who obeyed. Moses argued. Jeremiah said he was too young. Gideon asked for a sign twice after being told plainly, and God gave them, and Gideon still went out at night to tear down the altar because he was afraid to do it by day, and the account says so without one word of shame attached.

He did it at night. Afraid. And it counted exactly the same as if he had done it at noon singing.

You have never been required to feel it, and the absence of the feeling has not delayed one single thing, because the door was never in your chest. Scripture says the just shall live by faith (Habakkuk 2:4), and faith is described as the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1), and it is His Spirit rather than your emotional weather who supplies that conviction.

And here is what I want you to see about the dry certainty you keep setting aside.

That plain, warmthless sense that it is right, the one that has turned up more than once and never felt like anything: that is not the lesser thing. That may well be the answer, arriving in the register God most often uses with people He trusts, and being set aside every time because it did not come with music.

You have already received the guidance you have been asking for, and you have been putting it down every time it arrived because it came in plain clothes. It is written that His sheep hear His voice (John 10:27), and hearing is not the same as feeling, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been saying the same quiet thing to you for three years without raising His voice once.