More Here Than You Counted

The gate at the top of the lane has one hinge that sings when the frost is on it, a thin note about a tone and a half above the other one, and Stephen has heard it at twenty past six most mornings for nineteen years.

Dog first, then the lane, then back for the kettle. Past the field where the ponies stand with their backs to the wind. Past the mill, which is nine flats now and four of them empty. Past what was the bank and is a charity shop, and the surgery that moved eight miles up the road, and the building where the youth club ran on a Friday until the boiler went and nobody had the eleven thousand pounds.

He is not a bitter man. He would be embarrassed if you called him that. He prays on this lane, quietly, the same short prayers, and he means them, and he has done it so long that he no longer hears himself doing it either.

What he thinks, on the way back down, with his hands cold and the dog pulling, is a sentence he has never said out loud to a living soul: if God is doing something round here, I have not seen it.

And you have your own lane.

You have your own list of what closed. You could walk me down it and be perfectly fair about every item, because you are not exaggerating and you are not sulking. You are a person with two working eyes reporting what is in front of them. And somewhere in the last few years the report hardened into a verdict about the whole place, and the verdict quietly widened until it covered you as well.

The count was right. The count was short.

There is a morning in the book of Kings I want to walk you into, because the man in it does exactly what you do, and nobody in the story tells him off for it.

A young man gets up early, goes outside, and finds the town surrounded. Horses. Chariots. A whole force, in position, in the dark, while everybody slept. He comes back in and says the only sensible thing there is to say: what are we going to do.

Now watch what the prophet does not do. He does not say the army is imaginary. He does not tell the young man he is being negative, or that he needs to think differently, or that he would have seen better if he had gone out with a better attitude. The army was real. The count was accurate.

He simply prays that his eyes would be opened.

"O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see." So the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.2 Kings 6:17

Full. Not arriving. Not dispatched at the moment of the prayer. Already there, all around him, while he stood in the road doing his arithmetic.

You are not wrong about what you can see, and you are short by everything you cannot. That is not my flattery of your town; it is what the written account plainly says happened, and it is His Spirit who does now what He did on that hillside then. Being accurate and being complete are two different things, and only one of them is available to a pair of eyes.

He does not want you squinting

Here is the part I want to guard carefully, because this is where articles like this one usually go wrong.

Nobody in that story looked harder. The young man did not concentrate. He was not handed an exercise, a discipline or a way of noticing, and he was not sent back outside to try again with more faith in his chest. Another man asked God to open his eyes and God opened them. The whole event happened on the far side of a spoken prayer and none of it happened on the near side of an effort.

So I am not going to send you out to hunt for signs. Sign hunting turns a lane into a test and turns God into something that has to keep proving Himself to you before breakfast, and it is exhausting, and the day you find nothing you will file it as one more piece of evidence.

You have the eyes of your heart in the hands of the God who made them, and He opens what He made. That is written plainly: He enlightens the eyes of the heart, and it is His Spirit of wisdom and revelation who does it. Your eyesight is His department and He has never once treated a request for it as a nuisance.

Nothing here is a verdict on you

One more thing before the turn, and I want to say it slowly.

A flat month is not a message about your soul. A quiet year in a quiet town is not the Lord withdrawing from your postcode, and I will not tell you that the reason you have not seen anything is that something is wrong with you, because I do not know that and neither does anybody else who says it. Numbness has a hundred causes and half of them have nothing to do with God at all.

You were seen before you ever saw anything. His word says that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, and they were running across your lane every one of those nineteen winters, and His Spirit has been at work in that town the entire time without asking for your review.