It Is Springing Up and You Are the Last to Hear

The armchairs do not match and that was never a decision, it is just that people gave them and nobody was going to say no.

Side room off the main hall. Thursday afternoons, two till four. The urn takes eleven minutes and she puts it on at ten to. Biscuits on a plate with a doily because Elsie brought a doily once and now there is always a doily.

Four people came today. Ron, who comes every week and says almost nothing. Marie and her sister. And the woman with the dog who sits nearest the door.

She has written the email. It is in drafts. It says something about seasons and about being good stewards of the church's resources and it thanks everybody, and it means: I am stopping this.

Because four is not enough to justify a room and an urn and an afternoon. Because she used to have fourteen. Because she cannot point at anything this has produced, and every month she does not stop it she feels slightly more foolish.

She is not bitter. She is tired in a particular way, which is the tiredness of doing a small thing for a long time without any evidence that it counts.

Come and sit in the chair with the wonky arm before you press send. Because there is a verse in Isaiah with a question inside it, and the question is the kindest part.

The question in the middle of the promise

Isaiah 43. God is speaking to people who are in the middle of the long, dull, humiliating part of their history.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.Isaiah 43:19

Now read the three clauses in order, because the order does something.

I will do a new thing. Future. Now it shall spring forth. Present. Already germinating, right now, at the moment of speaking. Shall ye not know it? A question.

He is not asking whether they approve. He is asking whether they are going to notice. The new thing is already coming up, and He is checking whether anybody is going to register it.

That question is a mercy, because it locates the problem exactly. Not that nothing is happening. That nothing has been noticed.

You are being asked whether you will know it rather than whether it is there, and the springing forth in that verse is already in the present tense. That is not a hopeful stretch of a famous verse; Isaiah 43:19 says now it shall spring forth and then asks the question, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a word given to exiles and lays it in a side room with four armchairs that do not match. He is not asking you to believe something will start. He is asking whether you can see something that has.

Now the second half, and this is about the email.

You cannot point at anything this has produced. I believe you. But hold that sentence up to the light for a second, because there is an assumption in it about what counts as production, and the assumption came from somewhere other than Scripture.

Ron comes every week. Ron, who says almost nothing, gets up on a Thursday, in whatever weather, and comes to a room where somebody knows his name and pours him something hot. That is not a step toward a result. In the economy of the book you are working out of, that is the result.

You have been discounting the thing itself while you waited for it to lead somewhere, and a person not being alone on a Thursday is not a means to an end. Matthew 25:40 says inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a live account of an afternoon rather than a verse for a poster. Four people is not four short of something. It is four.

Wilderness is where He said it, and that is not incidental

One more thing, because it changes the arithmetic.

The rest of the verse is about a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. He did not say He would do a new thing in a fertile place. The whole picture is deliberately located where nothing should be possible.

Which means small and dry is not evidence against you. It is the described location. If your room had fourteen people and a waiting list, the verse would be less obviously about you, not more.

You are standing in exactly the sort of place He named when He described where the new thing goes, and small and dry was the address in the verse. Isaiah 43:19 puts the way in the wilderness and the rivers in the desert, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an unpromising room the likeliest room rather than the least likely.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than read out the notices.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not the attendance on a Thursday. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.