You Handed It Over And It Felt Like Losing

It was a Tuesday in November and you were thirty-six and you were on the floor of your own spare room, which is not something you do.

You had been carrying it for about fourteen years by then. Not a vague hope. A specific thing, with a shape, that you could have described to anybody in one sentence, and that you had never once described to anybody in one sentence.

And that night you gave it up. Properly. Not sulking, not bargaining, not putting it on a shelf to collect later. You handed it over the way a person hands over a key.

Everything you had ever read said something would happen next. Peace, or a lifting, or a sense of rightness.

What happened next was that you got up off the floor with a cold neck and went and put the kettle on, and it was raining, and you felt exactly nothing at all.

Seven years.

And in seven years, the only thing that has ever come from that night is a slow steady sense of having got smaller, and you have never once said that to anybody, because every account of surrender you have ever heard ends with the person receiving something, and yours does not, and the only conclusion available is that you did it wrong.

You did not do it wrong. That is the first thing I want to say and I will say it again before the end.

Jesus makes it a choosing and puts a verb after it

There is a sentence He says to eleven men on the last night, and it corrects the direction of the whole relationship, and then it does something with the correction that people almost never notice.

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain.John 15:16

Two verbs about Him and then two about you, and the two about you are not descriptions, they are a destination: that ye should go, and bring forth. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

Read the order. The choosing comes first. Then the ordaining. Then the going.

And notice what is entirely absent from that sentence, because its absence is the whole comfort in it. There is no mention of how the men felt about any of it. It is a statement of what has been done to them and what it is for, and their sensations on the night are not a component of the transaction.

So take this now, seven years on. You were chosen and appointed toward something, and the written word never once makes that conditional on what a person felt in a spare room in November, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the ordaining.

A cold neck and a kettle and no feeling whatsoever is a completely ordinary account of a real handover. It is only unusual in the retellings, and the retellings have been edited.

Surrender is not primarily an experience

Now let me deal directly with the thing that has been eating seven years.

Almost every account of surrender you have heard was told by somebody standing at a distance from it, looking back, after the second half had arrived. They tell you the moment and the peace in the same breath because by the time they are telling it, both have happened. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

Nobody tells you about the four years in the middle. Nobody tells you because nobody tells it while they are in it, and so a person in the middle assumes they are the only one and that the fault is theirs.

You are not the only one and there is no fault. Scripture says so plainly, and the Holy Spirit does not read it differently on a bad day.

And here is the harder half, which I will not skip. What has been handed to you since is almost certainly not going to look like a replacement ambition. It will not be the same shape as the thing you gave up. If you are waiting for the thing that fills the fourteen-year-shaped hole, you will keep missing what has actually been put in your hands, because it is a different shape entirely.

You are chosen and ordained toward fruit that remains. His word puts the going after the choosing, and the Holy Spirit has been ordaining rather than merely removing, and seven years of feeling smaller is a report on a sensation and not a report on the facts.

What was preached in a plain hall

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and one of the things preached in that plain room was being wholly set apart to God.

The trouble with that teaching, everywhere it has traveled since, is that the giving up is easy to preach and the sending is hard to arrange, so people preach half of it and let the other half look after itself.

In that room it could not go wrong that way, for a practical reason. The building had work in the streets outside it every day of the week. Somebody who came in having handed something over was in a place that needed both her hands immediately, and nobody had time to leave her in the middle of a transaction for seven years.

You have had the handing over without anybody in your life whose job it was to say what came next.

The written word says chosen, then ordained, then go, and the Holy Spirit has been holding all three of those over you since a Tuesday in November.