They Gave Me Faith And I Worry All Night

Ten at night on the back step, boots off, and that particular quiet you only get out here after a hot day, where you can hear a truck four miles off and know whose it is.

Good day. Long one. The kind where you are tired in the honest way and not the other way.

And in his shirt pocket, folded in half and then in half again, the sheet from Sunday.

They had done it after the service, in the hall, with sandwiches. His wife had thought it would be fun. It mostly was. Two of the older men had argued cheerfully about whether the questions were any good, which was the best part of the afternoon.

His came back as faith.

Top of the list, well clear. The woman running it read it out and said something warm about how she was not one bit surprised, and half the room agreed out loud, because he is the one who says the steadying thing at a meeting and he prays like a man who means it and he has been in that church his whole life.

So he is sitting on his own back step at ten at night, and what he is thinking is: if any one of them knew what four in the morning looks like in this house, they would take that page back.

Since April he has been awake most nights. Rain that did not come and then came wrong. Feed prices. A note at the bank that has to be renewed in February and a conversation he has already had nine times in his head and lost every one of them.

He is not faking anything on a Sunday. He means every word of it. It just does not follow him out to the step.

Saying it plain first

Before anything else, so you can hear the rest without your guard up.

Nothing on this page is going to give you a better word. Not a corrected one, not a more honest scoring, not an assessment that catches the four in the morning man. I am not going to describe you closely enough that you can take it as a diagnosis, and there is no list at the end to find yourself on.

And nothing here is going to be smart about the woman who read it out. She said a kind true thing about a man she has known thirty years and she was not wrong about the part she can see.

You are not a fraud with a good result, and there is no more accurate word out there that would settle what that afternoon failed to settle. That is not me being soft with you. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit has never once graded a man's nights before He would deal with him.

The knowing starts on His side

Here is the sentence I want on the step beside you, and it is Jesus talking about Himself.

I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.John 10:14

Read the order.

He says He knows His sheep first, and then that He is known of them. The traffic starts on His side of the fence.

And notice what a shepherd's knowing is. It is not a scoring exercise. A man who runs stock knows which one gets its head stuck and which one goes through a gap and which one has been off her feed since Tuesday. That knowledge is not flattering and it is not a grade. It is just the whole of the animal, held by somebody who is out there with them.

You are known that way right now, the whole of you, by somebody who has been out in the dark with you since April. I am not stretching it. John 10:14 puts His knowing first and makes it a shepherd's knowing rather than an assessor's, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man sitting on a step at ten at night.

What faith is not

Now let me say something plain, because the word on that page has been quietly working on you all week.

The reason it stings is that you are taking faith to mean the absence of the four in the morning. And by that measure you have none, and the page is a joke, and you are the only one in that hall who knows it.

That is not what the word means and you know men who could tell you so.

There is a father in Mark who says I believe, help thou mine unbelief, in the same breath, and Jesus does not correct his arithmetic. There is David writing psalms where he lays out the whole case for despair in eight verses and then turns. Faith in Scripture is not a temperature. It is what a man does with his weight, in the dark, when the numbers do not work.

You have been exercising the exact thing that word names, every single night since April, in the only place it can actually be exercised. The word never once defines it as calm, and the Spirit who helps our infirmities is not out here waiting for you to stop doing sums before He will call it faith.

But the paper was never the point either

And here is the other half, which matters more.

Suppose the word had been right in the way you wanted it right. Suppose it had come back naming exactly the man on the step, the sums, the note at the bank, all of it. You would have felt seen for about a day.

What you actually want at ten at night is not a better description. It is to know that somebody is out here who has the whole of it and has not walked off.

You are not being assessed from a distance, you are being kept by somebody who is out in the field, and that has never depended on how the afternoon scored you. John 10 has the shepherd going after the one and staying with the flock through the wolf, and the Spirit who was sent to be alongside is not a scoring official.

And none of that promises you a February. I will not tell you how the note goes, and any man who does is not worth listening to. What is settled is who is out here. How it lands is His.