Woken by Kindness

The training room has a flip chart nobody has written on yet and a plate of biscuits going soft under plastic wrap. Everybody is wearing a name badge in a plastic sleeve on a blue lanyard, and everybody has written their name too small. Day two of three. The facilitator says the word cascade four times before half past ten.

She is good in these rooms. She always has been. When the breakout group stalls she asks the question that unsticks it, and two people write down what she says, and the man opposite says that is exactly it and points his pen at her. She smiles. She takes a biscuit she does not want. On the outside of her there is a competent woman contributing well to a session about internal communications.

And on the inside there is nothing at all. Not sadness. Not resentment. Nothing, the way a hand feels after you have slept on it. She could not tell you when it started, because there was no morning it started on. She still prays. She still gets the children where they are going and rings her father on Sundays and reads the passage on the app before bed and could summarize it for you afterwards. Somewhere in the last few years she stopped arriving in her own life, and she kept doing every single thing in it, and nobody noticed, including her.

If that is you, put down whatever you were about to use to defend it, because nobody here is asking you to. Nothing is wrong with your life. That is the strangest part and it is why you have never mentioned this to a soul: there is no crisis to point at, no sin to name, no year you went off. You have simply been going through all of it and not really being in the room. Stay with me a minute. There is a hand about to touch your shoulder and it is not an angry one.

He wakes people gently and He always has

There is a scene in Scripture that ought to be more famous than it is, and it is the best picture of a kind waking anywhere in the book.

A prophet has run for a day into the desert and sat down under a broom tree and asked to die. He is not backslidden. He has just come off the biggest day of his working life. He is finished, flat, done, and he lies down and sleeps.

And he lay down and slept under the broom tree. And behold, an angel touched him and said to him, "Arise and eat."1 Kings 19:5

No sermon. No accounting for the running. No question about why a man of God is lying in the dirt in the middle of the afternoon. A touch, and a word of two syllables, and when he opens his eyes there is a cake baked on hot stones by his head and a jar of water beside it. He eats. He lies down again. And God lets him. The messenger comes back a second time, touches him again, and says the tenderest sentence in the chapter: arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.

That is how heaven wakes somebody. Twice, with food, and with an acknowledgement that the road was long.

So take this as settled, because it is. You are not in trouble, and whatever has been flat in you did not put you outside anything and is not being held against you. The hand on your shoulder now is the same hand that baked bread for a man too tired to ask for it. I am not inventing a kindness for you. That is what stands written in 1 Kings 19, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a broom tree in a desert and lays it over a Tuesday in a training room.

Now let me tell you what I think has been happening, without diagnosing you, because I cannot and I will not.

Numbness is not the absence of God. It is much more often the presence of a person carrying more than one heart can feel at once. Something in you went quiet so that the rest of you could keep functioning, and it worked, and it kept working, and after long enough the quiet stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like your personality. You did not choose that. You were not neglecting anything. And you are not required, here or anywhere, to go back and feel whatever you numbed. Some of what people put to sleep was put to sleep for reasons that were never their fault.

Here is the thing Scripture says about it long before I do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who presses it home. Sleep did not take you anywhere.

If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand. When I awake, I am still with You.Psalm 139:18

David falls asleep counting the thoughts of God toward him, and the punchline is where he is when he opens his eyes. Still there. Still with Him. The sleeping never moved him an inch, and the waking is not a return journey.

Which means you have not fallen behind, and there is no distance to make up. You are with Him right now, in a plastic chair, holding a biscuit you did not want. That is not my encouragement to you, that is what the word says of the sleeper, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old psalm arrive in a room that smells of dry-wipe markers.

And you have a mouth, which is the last thing to say before the waking part.

Jesus taught in Matthew 17:20 that a faith no bigger than a seed can be spoken to a mountain and the mountain will go. Notice how small the requirement is: smaller than the writing on your name badge, smaller than anything you would put on a form. It is not the size of what you feel, and it is not the quality of your presence today. It is that a person opens their mouth. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. The current is the Holy Spirit's. The switch is in your hand and it always has been.