The Look Of Not Needing It

You have a face you do for it and it is extremely good.

It goes on when somebody else's work gets named from the front. It is warm, it is genuinely pleased, it turns slightly toward the person being praised, and there is a small nod in it. Nobody has ever seen through it. You have been doing it for about twelve years and it is, honestly, one of your better skills.

Underneath the face, for about four seconds, there is something you have never described to a single human being.

It is not resentment of them. Get that straight, because you have accused yourself of it and it is not accurate. You are pleased for them. Both things are running at once and that is the part nobody warns you about.

Underneath, in the same four seconds, there is a small clear voice that says: nobody has ever said that about mine.

And then it goes and you are entirely fine and you say something warm and true and you mean it.

Twelve years of four seconds.

Here is what has happened as a result and it is the reason you are reading this. You have got so good at the face that you now give off, at all times, the unmistakable signal of a person who does not need to be told. And people believe signals. So they do not tell you.

You have built the thing that guarantees the hunger stays fed by nothing.

And you cannot say a word about it, ever, to anybody, because a woman who says out loud that she would like to be told she did well has, in that same sentence, forfeited the possibility of it meaning anything when it comes.

God says He is the one doing the looking

There is a verse where God describes His own work in a way that sounds like an investigation and is actually a relief, once you see who is doing what.

I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.Jeremiah 17:10

Read the first four words as a fact about your situation. I the Lord search the heart.

Not the face. Not the small nod. Not the twelve years of skilled composure that everybody in that building has taken at face value. The heart, searched, by the only one in the room who can actually see it.

Now feel what that does to the four seconds.

You have been carrying an unwitnessed hunger, and unwitnessed is the whole weight of it. It is not that you want applause, particularly. It is that something true about you has been running underneath a face for twelve years with nobody ever once knowing it was there.

It has been known the entire time. The written word says He searches the heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that four seconds with you every single time, and you have never been in it alone even once.

He is not searching in order to catch you

Now, that verse can be read as a threat and it has been preached as one, so let me put the other half in.

Look at why He searches, in the same sentence: even to give every man according to his ways. He is looking in order to give. It is a verse about a God who does not miss things, and specifically about a God who does not miss the things nobody else saw.

Which means the reading, the twelve years of quietly excellent work that nobody named from any platform, has not gone unrecorded anywhere. It went straight to the only place where a record is kept accurately.

And it means the four seconds are not a shameful secret. They are a real hunger in a real person, and He can see them, and He has never once been disgusted by them.

You are known all the way down. That is what is written and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the knowing, and there is nothing under your face that has to be hidden better before God will come near it.

The plain hall and the inward gift

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and the doctrine he preached in that plain room was a clean heart: an inward work, done by God, given to people who had been told they were not the sort who qualified.

Those two things belong together, and when they come apart this doctrine goes bad in a very particular way.

In a room where the good seats are bought, a clean heart becomes another visible achievement, another thing to be seen to have, and the whole business of managing an appearance simply moves inside. The written word never once offered it as an achievement, and the Holy Spirit has never asked anybody to be seen having it. Now you are performing an inward state as well as an outward one, and a woman with a very good face has more to manage than she started with.

In a plain hall with nothing to buy, there is no appearance to keep. The gift is given to people who arrive with nothing and everybody in the room knows it, so nobody has to look like anything.

You are eligible in the state you are in, with the face still on. His word searches and knows and the Holy Spirit gives without a display being required first.