He Went Home Wondering

He has been waiting for it since he was twenty-six and he has never told anybody that is what he is doing.

It is a specific thing he is waiting for. He would not use the word thunderclap and that is what it is: a moment, unmistakable, where the thing stops being something he holds and becomes something that has hold of him, and after which he would never again lie awake at half past four working it over.

He has seen it happen to other people. Or he thinks he has. There is a man in that church who talks about a night in 1994 the way you would talk about a car accident, and there is a woman who cannot get through the story without stopping, and he has watched both of them with a specific hunger that he would be embarrassed to have named.

He is fifty-eight.

Thirty-two years of turning up. Thirty-two years of doing it properly, giving, going, being the one who locks up, and thirty-two years of getting into a truck afterwards feeling almost exactly as he felt getting out of it.

He does not doubt it, particularly. That is the odd part and it is why he has never raised it with anybody. If you asked him he would say yes, plainly, and he would mean it.

He has just been waiting three decades for the moment that would make it certain, and he has begun to suspect, in the last year or so, that he is going to die waiting, and that there is something wrong with him that other people do not have.

Peter left that tomb and went home wondering

Let me put down the suspicion first, because it has been growing for a year and it is wrong.

There is nothing missing in you. The hunger you have been embarrassed about is not a symptom of a defect, and the two people you have been watching are not evidence of a normal you failed to meet. They are two people. You have been running a survey with a sample of two, in a building of a hundred and forty, and you have never asked one of the other hundred and thirty-eight.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as consolation: the account itself does not end that morning in certainty, and the man it puts at the tomb goes home in exactly your condition. That is not my kind reading of thirty-two years, it is what stands written in the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it has been in that truck with you every week.

Read it. It is one verse and almost nobody preaches it.

Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.Luke 24:12

He went away, wondering to himself what had happened.

He was there. He was inside the thing, on the morning, at the actual place, looking at the actual cloths.

And he went home wondering.

There is no thunderclap in that verse. There is a man walking back through a city at dawn turning something over that he cannot get to the bottom of, and the account keeps it and does not tidy it, and it does not present his wondering as a failure.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a moment that has not come: what you have been calling a defect is the condition of the first man to look, because the written word takes him from the tomb to his own house still wondering, and the Spirit of God is the one who saw to it that the unresolved version stayed in the record.

And here is what thirty-two years actually look like from outside the truck, which nobody has ever said to you.

You have turned up. Every week, in weather, when it was thin, when the numbers dropped, when the man who talks about that night was away for eight months. You are the one who locks up. There are about eleven people in that building whose worst year had you in it, and what is written calls that faithfulness rather than waiting, and the Holy Spirit has been in every one of those weeks.

That is not somebody waiting for faith to start. That is a man who has been doing the thing for three decades on nothing but the decision to do it, which is a harder and rarer article than a night in 1994.