Nothing to Report

Yolanda sat through eleven testimonies and had nothing.

And they were real. That is what has to be said first, because it would be easy to write this article the other way and it would be a lie. Every one of those eleven was true and specific and hard won. A job after fourteen months. A brother who rang for the first time since the funeral. A woman who stood up and could not finish and had to be helped back into her seat and everybody knew why and it was glorious.

Nobody in that room was performing. Nobody was exaggerating. Yolanda knows those people and she would tell you every word of it was straight.

And her own thing is exactly where it was in 2021.

Not worse. That would at least be a development. The same. The same four years, the same phone calls, the same conversation with the same department, the same weekend arrangement that has never once been reviewed and never once got easier.

So she clapped for all eleven, and she meant it, and by about the seventh she had started doing a small quiet arithmetic that she is ashamed of.

Fourteen months. Two years. Nine weeks. Four years and I have got nothing.

And what she has never said out loud, to a living soul, is what came after that.

Which means it is me.

Not a doctrine. Not something anybody in that room has ever said or would ever say. A conclusion a tired woman reached on her own in a plastic chair while good people gave God the glory around her.

Then Sister Pauline stood up.

She is seventy-eight. She had a hand on the chair in front of her and she was not going anywhere near the front.

And she said, "I have got nothing to report."

The room went quiet in a particular way.

"Four years now, on the same thing. Nothing has moved. I am not going to stand here and make something up out of it."

And then she said, "I am still here, though."

And somebody said amen, and then a lot of people said amen, and Sister Pauline sat down.

And Yolanda put her hand over her mouth and cried for about ninety seconds in a room where nobody minded.

Now let me ask you what yours is.

The thing you would have to say if somebody handed you the microphone tonight, which is that it is exactly where it was, and that you have run out of ways to describe it.

He asked three times and it did not go

Paul writes about something in his own life that he never names, and the not naming is a mercy, because it lets everybody put their own thing in the gap.

Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness."2 Corinthians 12:8 to 9

I implored the Lord three times. Not a man with a casual prayer life. The apostle. The one who had been caught up into the third heaven, four verses earlier.

That it might leave me. He asked for removal, plainly, which is what you have been asking for, and there is no suggestion anywhere in the passage that asking for removal was the wrong request.

And it did not leave him.

Read that flatly, because church rooms tend to hurry past it. Paul asked three times and the answer was no, and he wrote it down and put his name on it and sent it to a church that thought he was insufficiently impressive.

So hear this said over you, in the plastic chair with your hands in your lap. You are not the exception in that room, and the fact that your thing has not moved in four years is not a report on your faith. That is written in the letters of the man who wrote most of the New Testament, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who supplies grace in a situation that has not changed, which is a work you cannot see happening and would not be able to point at if asked.

Now let me handle the sentence you have never said out loud.

Which means it is me.

It does not. And I am not going to soften that or nuance it. There is nothing in Scripture, anywhere, that makes a four year situation into a verdict on the person inside it, and there is a great deal in Scripture that goes the other way: Job, who was told plainly at the start that he had done nothing; Paul, who asked three times; a man born blind, about whom Jesus said explicitly that neither he nor his parents had sinned.

The instinct to read an unmoved circumstance as a private failure is one of the oldest and most expensive lies there is, and you have been carrying it for four years without ever putting it into words, which is exactly how it survives.

You are not the reason.

And now let me say what this article will not tell you either.

It will not tell you what God is doing. I do not know. Nothing here says He arranged the four years to build something in you, and nothing here suggests the thing would have moved by now if you had believed harder or prayed differently.

What is here is one line, and it is Paul's, and it is enough to stand on. My grace is sufficient for you.

Not sufficient to remove it. Sufficient for you, in it, unaltered, this weekend, with the same arrangement and the same department and the same phone call.

That is a promise about supply rather than about outcome, and it is the only kind of promise honest enough to make to somebody in year four. The Spirit of God is the one who supplies it, and He does it invisibly, which is why a woman can be carried for four years and conclude that nothing is happening.

And Sister Pauline named the evidence, and she named it correctly.

I am still here.

Four years, unmoved, and she is still in the room. That is not nothing. Nobody stays in a room like that under their own steam for four years. Something is holding her, and it is not her own grip, and the same thing is holding you.

There was a man five hundred years ago who taught that God's power comes hidden under weakness, and that the person who can only recognize God in visible improvement has learned to read the wrong signs. He had watched that in his own body for years and he never claimed to know why.