Forty Years of Waiting to Be Told

She shells beans on the porch in the evening because her mother did, and because a bowl in your lap gives your hands something to do while you think.

Forty years in the same building. She has the notebooks. Cardboard covers, one a year, some years two, all of them in a box in the back room, and every one of them full of a neat hand taking down what was said at the front. She has washed up after more church suppers than she could count. She has prayed for three ministers by name every morning, including the one nobody liked.

And she is still waiting.

She would not put it that way. If you asked her she would say she was learning, and that she still gets something new every week, and both of those are true. But underneath the true things there is a small patient posture she has held since she was thirty two, and the posture is this: one day somebody is going to say the thing. The real part. There is a way this all fits, about money and about the rest of it, that people who have really got hold of God know, and it comes out eventually, and when it does she will be sitting there ready with a pen.

Forty years of being ready with a pen.

She has never once asked. That is the part that she would find hardest to explain. Asking would be pushy, and it would show that all this time she has not had it, and she has been the woman other people ask. So she has waited politely, with a bowl in her lap, for four decades.

You know that porch. Yours may be a chair in a study group where you nod along. It may be a friendship where you have never once said I do not understand this. You may be young and already doing it. There is a thing you assume is being saved for later, and you have been too well mannered to ask, and the waiting has quietly become the shape of your whole faith.

Shift up on the swing and let me sit down. I want to show you the one line in the Bible that uses the word secret about God, because it does not say what people think it says.

There is no code, and the secret is a friendship

Let me say it plain, the way I would say it to you here, because the name over this door promises a secret and I am not going to leave a good woman sitting with a pen.

There is no code. Nothing is being saved for later. Nobody at the front of that building has a part they have not preached, and if any of them did, that would be a scandal and not a qualification. There is no arrangement of Scripture about money that God gives out at the end to whoever has waited longest. He is not that sort of company, and I have kept His company a long while.

Now, there is a line that mentions a secret, and I want to put it in your hands rather than have you meet it in somebody else's mouth.

The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant.Psalm 25:14

Do you see what it does in the second half? It tells you what the first half means. The secret of the Lord is not a technique He is withholding. Read the second half. He will show them His covenant. That is the whole content of it, and showing is the opposite of hiding.

I will put it the way my grandmother would have. There are two kinds of things a person does not know about you. There is what you are keeping from them, and there is what they would know if they sat with you. A neighbor of forty years knows how you take your tea and which of your knees is bad and what you will not say about your father, and none of that was ever secret. It was intimate. That word secret in that verse is the second kind. It is what a friend knows because a friend is close, and He hands over the covenant itself to make sure of it.

You are not on the far side of anything, and there has never been a part of God kept back for later. That is not a comfort I made up on a porch to be kind to you. It is written into the twenty fifth Psalm, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about friendship and lays it across forty years of notebooks.

You have His covenant, shown and not filed, and He has been telling you the real part every week for four decades. Scripture says He will show them, in plain future certainty, and His Spirit is the one who makes a written promise land on a woman with a bowl in her lap.

Now let me say the true thing under it, since we are sitting.

The waiting did something. It taught you, quietly, that you are a person who receives second. And you built a whole life of service on top of that, and it looked like humility, and a good deal of it was humility. But some of it was a small grief you never named. All those years you were the one who did the washing up while the real conversation happened somewhere else, and you assumed that was the order of things, and you were gracious about it.

You are not second in line, and God has never once run a queue where the quiet get served last. Scripture says He calls His own friends and makes known to them what He heard from His Father, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the word friends and makes it a chair pulled up rather than a doctrine.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a posture forty years deep does not change because an old woman said something warm on a porch. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what patient sitting never does. So say it out loud, here, with the beans and the light going. You have the standing to speak to an old habit of waiting and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position and not by long service, and the Holy Spirit carries a spoken word further than the end of your yard.