They Did Not Believe It Either

Somebody in that room says God did something amazing this week and she can feel her face doing it before she has decided anything.

Not a sneer. Nothing anybody would catch. A very small internal step backwards, a fraction of a second long, that goes roughly: what actually happened, though.

It happens every time. It happened when a woman she loves told her about a job coming through. It happened at a funeral. It happened when her own sister rang her about a scan.

Her sister's scan was fine, and her first thought was that they had probably read it wrong the first time.

She is thirty-eight and she has been like this since she was a child and she has never once told anybody, because in that building there are people who receive things the way you would receive a parcel: they open it and they are glad and they say thank you and there is no gap anywhere in the process.

She watches them with something she is not proud of.

And what has been growing for about three years is a settled private verdict, which is that she is the wrong shape for this. That whatever the receiving organ is, hers does not work, and that she has been faking a normal reaction for two decades and will keep faking it until she dies.

The first response inside the account was not faith

Let me put the verdict where it belongs before anything else, because it was passed by comparison and comparison had no standing to pass it.

You have been measuring yourself against people opening parcels. That is a real thing that some people do and it is not fake and there is nothing wrong with it, and there are perhaps four of them in that building and you have never counted the rest.

And a fraction of a second is not a sneer. Nobody has caught it because there is nothing to catch. What you have is a mind that checks, arriving fast, before the gladness has got its coat on, and nothing written condemns that, and the Holy Spirit walked seven miles beside it.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as reassurance: the first response inside the account itself was not faith, and the text says so in the mouths of two of His own. That is not my kind reading of three 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 room every time your face did it.

Read what two of them say to a stranger on a road, describing that same morning.

In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but did not find His body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said He was alive. Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but Him they did not see.Luke 24:22-24

But Him they did not see.

That is how they tell it. Not He is risen. They give the report, they say the tomb checked out, and then they add the qualifier, and the whole speech is in the tone of people describing a thing that has not settled.

These are His own. On the day. Walking away from the city.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a different temperament: your first move is not a disqualification, because the written word records the first response of His closest as a report with a qualifier on the end, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept the unsettled version in the account rather than a tidy one.

And here is the piece that will take three years off you.

The account does not treat them as failures. He walks with them. He talks to them for hours. He does not say your reaction is the problem and He does not leave them on that road.

The checking mind is not what He works around. It is what He came and walked beside for seven miles.