The Healing That Has Not Come

Four Novembers.

That is how she counts it, because it started in a November, and every time that month comes round again it does the counting for her whether she wants it done or not.

The first November she prayed like a woman who expected an answer by Christmas. The second one she was still asking, out loud, properly, with her hands open. By the third she had noticed something she did not like about herself, which was that she had started saying if in places where she used to say when, and she had not decided to do that, it had simply happened, the way a gate that has been swinging for years starts to hang wrong.

And this November she has stopped mentioning it in front of people.

Not because she has given up. She has not given up. It is that she cannot bear the faces any more. There is the face that goes soft and sad, which she can just about stand. There is the bright one that tells her to keep believing, which makes her want to leave the room. And there is the worst one, the one that flickers for half a second before it gets arranged, and in that half second she can see the question the person is too kind to ask.

Why has nothing happened?

She has asked it herself at the sink more times than she could count. And underneath it, in a voice she would never let out of her mouth in daylight, the other one.

Is it me?

Now, I am going to put that woman down and speak to you directly, because you know what month yours started in. You could give me the date. And you have been standing a long time, and you are tired of standing, and you have got to the stage where you do not know whether you are believing God or just refusing to admit something.

I am not going to give you a date today. Anybody who does is selling you something that was not theirs to hand over.

But I am going to take one thing off you, and it is the heaviest thing you are carrying, and it is not the illness.

The silence is not a verdict on you

There was a prophet who stood on a wall and complained to God about exactly this. He said how long. He said I cry out and You do not hear. He put it in writing and it went into the Bible with the complaint intact.

And the answer he got was not a rebuke.

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.Habakkuk 2:3

Stay in the middle of that verse with me for a moment, because there is a phrase in it that most people read straight past, and it is the phrase that will hold you up.

Though it tarry.

God says that. God, describing His own word, uses the word tarry, which means late by any human reckoning. He does not deny the delay. He does not tell the man he has misread the situation, or that time is different up there, or that he is only impatient. He looks at a delay that is genuinely a delay and He calls it what it is.

Which means this, and I want you to take it slowly: a tarrying is not, by itself, evidence of anything. It is not evidence that God said no. It is not evidence that God never said anything. And it is certainly not evidence about you.

That is the weight I want off your back. You have been carrying the delay as though it were a report card. Four Novembers of quietly assuming that the length of this is a measurement of something in you, your faith, your obedience, the sin you cannot think of but suspect is there. It is not. The Bible has a man complaining about a delay and God answering him without one word of blame, and that answer is standing in Scripture forever so that you would not have to invent a reason out of your own life.

You did not cause this by not believing hard enough. I would say that to your face.

Now, the second half of the verse says the vision keeps an appointed time, and I want to be honest with you about what that does and does not give us. It gives us a God who keeps appointments and does not forget. It does not give me the right to hand you a month, and it does not give anybody the right to tell you what God has committed to do in your body. That belongs to Him and He has not put it in my hands or anybody else's.

So I will tell you what I actually have.

You are not standing in front of a closed door with nobody behind it. You are not talking to a room that emptied years ago. The waiting is not silence. It has never once been silence, and the fact that it sounds like silence to you is not proof, because you have been listening from inside four hard years and that is not a fair place to judge acoustics from.