You Are Waiting To Feel Something

The fog came over the ridge in about ninety seconds, which is how it happens up there, and Sian went from being able to see four miles of green to being able to see her own hands.

Six of them on that walk and she was second from the back. The voices in front went strange and flat, close and far away at once. Somebody laughed and it sounded like it came from underneath them.

She stopped. That is the instinct and it is the wrong one, and she knew it was the wrong one and she stopped anyway, because when you cannot see the path the whole idea of going forward feels like a thing you are inventing.

Bethan came back down the line. Sixty-odd, boots older than Sian, entirely unbothered.

Are you all right.

I cannot see the path.

And Bethan said the thing that Sian has repeated to people every year since. She said: you are not going to see it. Look, this is the trick. Feel it with your boot.

She made her do it right there. Step to the left, into the heather: soft, springy, uneven, a bit of give and a squelch under the sole. Step back to the right, onto the path: harder. Flatter. A grit to it. Two hundred years of feet had pressed that line into the hill and it was still pressed into it, and it did not care in the slightest that nobody could see it.

They walked the next mile like that, slowly, feeling for the harder ground, and the fog stayed down the whole way, and the path was under them the entire time.

You have been standing on a hill in fog for a while now, and you have been waiting for it to lift before you take a step, and the fog is a feeling that has not come.

You have heard people describe theirs. The night, the warmth, the room, the certainty. And you have listened and nodded and gone home and thought, that has never happened to me, so presumably I am standing outside the thing they are all standing inside.

Do not move yet. Just feel for the ground.

The sentence that was spoken over the empty ground

Picture a whole nation drawn up on a plain at the end of a long journey. Families, elders, foreigners who had joined them on the road, water carriers, children asleep against their mothers. An oath is being spoken over them, out loud, and the day is enormous and everybody there knows it.

And then, in the middle of it, comes a line about people who are not there.

Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath; But with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD our God, and also with him that is not here with us this dayDeuteronomy 29:14

Sit with that for a second. The oath was being cut with the people standing on the grass in front of him, and with people who were somewhere else entirely: unborn, elsewhere, asleep in a tent, out with the animals, not paying attention.

The ones on the plain had a day they would tell their grandchildren about. The others had nothing at all. No noise, no crowd, no shiver up the back of the neck. And the covenant reached both groups by exactly the same amount, because the reach of an oath is measured by the one swearing it and never by the goosebumps of the one it lands on.

You were included in something on a day you have no memory of, and the absence of a memory has never once made the inclusion partial. I am not being kind to you here. Deuteronomy 29:14 puts the ones who were not standing there inside the same oath as the ones who were, and the Holy Spirit is the One taking that plain in another country and setting it under a person in fog.

What the promises actually rest on

Here is the sentence that pulls the whole thing together, and it is worth reading twice for one small word.

For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto the glory of God by us.2 Corinthians 1:20

In him. Not: in your response to Him. Not: in the intensity of the evening you had. The promises are yes in Christ, and where the yes lives is the whole point of the sentence.

Which means the confirmation you have been waiting for is not a feeling that is late. It is a person, and He arrived.

You have been trying to verify from your side something that was settled from His, and Scripture never once asks you to countersign it with an emotion. 2 Corinthians 1:20 puts the yes in Christ, and the Spirit is the One who makes that a floor you can stand on rather than a phrase you can quote.

Feelings are weather, and weather is real

None of this means the feelings are fake or that people who had a night like that were imagining it. Some of them were not. God moves on people and He does it as He pleases, and when He does, it is worth every word they use about it.

But weather is not the ground. A hill in bright sun and the same hill in fog are the same hill, at the same height, with the same path pressed into it. What changed was visibility. Nothing under the boot changed at all.

And that ought to be a relief rather than a disappointment, because it means the worst week you have had was not a report on your standing, and the best evening you have had was not the source of it.

Right now, as you read, the ground under you is not being adjusted according to what you can feel of it. Scripture says the promises are yes in Him, full stop, and His Spirit is the One pressing that down into somebody who has spent years assuming the fog was a verdict.