The Thing I Sowed and Never Told

She has never said it out loud. Four years, and not to one living person.

It was an evening meeting, and the room was full, and there was a point in it where she was on her feet with everybody else and something in her genuinely rose. That part was real. She would still say that part was real.

And then there was a moment where a figure was named, and it was explained what it was for and what it would open, and there was a queue, and she stood in it.

She did not have it. That is the part. She had it in the sense that it was physically in an account, and she did not have it in the sense that it was going to be needed eleven days later, and she knew that standing in the queue, and she stood in the queue anyway.

Nothing opened.

The eleven days came and she managed, the way she always manages, by doing three things she has never described to anybody. It was a hard month and then it was a hard quarter and then it was just her life again.

And she has never once told a soul. Not her sister. Not the woman she prays with on a Tuesday, who tells her everything. Not anybody at that church, because half of them were in that queue and the other half were not and she does not want to be the story either way.

The silence is four years old now, and it has become the heavy part. Heavier than the money, which is long gone and would be nothing to her now.

You know that queue. Yours might be a different meeting, or a different promise, or something you were told would shift a thing that was breaking your heart. And the not telling has become its own weight, and it is nobody's fault that you are carrying it alone, because nobody knows there is anything to carry.

Come and sit down at the front here after everybody has gone. It is just us and the organ. There is one line about how far God moves a thing, and I want it in your hands this morning.

There is no code, and there is a distance

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to be another voice putting one in front of a woman who has already stood in a queue.

There is no code. Nothing you give opens anything, and that is not a small point, it is the whole ground this site stands on. God does not run a mechanism where an amount goes in and a result comes out. If He did, He would be a machine, and machines have no mercy in them at all.

And I am not going to spend this morning naming anybody. I do not know what that man believed. Your freedom is not going to be manufactured out of his condemnation, because a freedom made that way needs him to stay guilty forever in order to keep working, and you have carried enough for four years without carrying him as well.

Here is the line.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

That is a deliberate choice of directions and everybody misses it.

North and south have a limit. There is a north pole. You go far enough north and you start going south, and the two meet, and the distance between them is a number.

East and west never meet. There is no east pole. You can travel east forever and never once begin traveling west, and the distance between them is not a large number, it is not a number at all.

That is the measurement He chose to describe how far He has moved it.

You are not standing at a measurable distance from what you did, and the direction He chose was the one with no meeting point in it. That is not a comfort I have arranged in an empty church. It is written into Psalm 103, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a psalmist's choice of compass points and lays it on a woman who has been silent for four years.

You have a God who removed it in a direction that does not come back round, and He chose that direction on purpose. Scripture says as far as the east is from the west, and His Spirit is the one who makes a piece of ancient geography land in a chest that has been holding something since an evening meeting.

Now let me name the actual weight, because it stopped being about the money a long time ago.

It is the silence. Four years of it. And here is what silence does: it makes a thing bigger every year without a single new fact being added to it. What you are carrying now is not the decision you made in a queue. It is four years of never once saying it, and the not saying has done all the growing.

And I know exactly why you have not said it. Because the moment you say it, you become, in somebody's eyes, a woman who did that. And you have been a great many things in that building for a long time and none of them is that.

Hear me. You are not a woman who did that. You are a woman who stood up in a room because something in her rose, and who wanted a thing to shift, and who stood in a queue with real faith and bad information, and the faith was yours and the information came from somewhere else.

You are not defined by eleven days in a hard month, and the faith that put you in that queue was the best thing in the room. Scripture says that God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and the love in that queue was real whatever the teaching around it was, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman hear that about her own evening.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because four years of silence does not end because somebody was warm to you in a pew. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what carrying it alone never does. So open your mouth, out loud, right here. You have the standing to speak to a silence and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by giving, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a building.