You Turned It Into Being Reasonable

Everybody says you handled it well. They have been saying it for six years.

You were the one who did not shout. You were the one who kept talking to the other side when your cousin would not. You were the one who said, at the meeting where it all finally went, that there was no sense in anybody being bitter about a thing that could not be undone, and there were people in that room who thanked you afterwards with tears in their eyes.

It was true. That is the thing. Everything you said was true and it was also the right thing to say and the family is still a family because somebody said it.

Here is what nobody knows.

You cannot find it any more.

Not the memory. The memory is intact and you could give the dates and the names and the sequence of it in your sleep. What you cannot find is the feeling. You go looking for it sometimes, deliberately, late, and there is a place where it used to be and now there is a kind of smooth flat surface, and your hand goes over it and finds nothing to hold.

And a person is not supposed to want their anger back. You know that. It is the whole reason you have never said this to anybody, because it sounds like a woman asking permission to be bitter, and that is not what this is.

It is that you have started to notice the surface in other places. Your daughter's wedding. The morning your grandson was born.

Six years ago you converted something, in about four months, all on your own, out of love for your family, and you did not know that it was a conversion of the whole material rather than of one particular thing.

Name it fully before you lift it

I am not going to move quickly over this, because it is the wound and it deserves its actual size before anything else is said.

You lost something. Then you lost the ability to feel that you had lost it, and you lost that second thing while being praised for it, which means that for six years the very thing that took your feeling has been handed to you repeatedly as a compliment.

That is a real injury and it happened to a real person and I am not calling it small, and I am not going to hurry you into a chorus about it.

Now here is what God says about that exact material.

And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh.Ezekiel 11:19

Look at what He does not do in that sentence. He does not soften the stone. He does not ask the person to try to feel more. He does not give them an exercise.

He takes it out. It is a removal, done by Him, and the replacement is flesh, which is the material that can be hurt and can also be reached.

So take this now, on the grass, at the end of an afternoon. You are not permanently made of what you turned into. The written word says He takes the stone out and gives flesh in its place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the taking, and six years of a smooth flat surface has not fixed you into that shape for good.

The reasonable one was not lying

Now let me guard something, because there is a way of hearing this that would ruin six years of real work.

You were not being false at that meeting. What you said was true and the written word calls that kind of true a peacemaking, and the Holy Spirit was in the room while you said it, and it saved a family. There is a version of this message that would tell you that you should have raged, and that the raging would have been more honest, and it is nonsense, and it would have cost your grandchildren their cousins.

The problem is not that you were reasonable. The problem is what you had to do to yourself to get there in four months on your own with nobody helping you.

You did not lay the thing down. There was no one there to lay it down in front of. So you did the only other thing available to a person, which is that you made it into stone, because stone does not hurt, and you carried on.

That was not a sin. It was survival, done well, by somebody with nobody to help.

And it is exactly why the promise is a removal and not a lecture. You have a heart of flesh on offer as a gift. His word says He takes the stone out Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries out the exchange, and nothing you did in those four months has disqualified you from it.

The plain hall and the clean heart

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and what he preached in that plain room was a clean heart, given by God, on the inside, to people who had been treated as though they were not the sort who got one.

The room and the doctrine came out of the same conviction, and separated, this teaching does harm.

Preached where the good seats are bought, an inward work becomes a standard, and a woman who cannot feel anything hears it as a report on her own failure and stops listening. Which is right of her. A standard is no use to somebody made of stone; you cannot exhort granite.

Preached in a plain hall, it stays what it is, which is an operation performed on people who cannot perform it on themselves.

You are eligible for it exactly as you are, feeling nothing. The written word puts the whole of it in His hands and the Holy Spirit is the one who does it.