The Quiet Months

He can date it, which is the part he does not tell people, because a man who can date it sounds like a man who has been keeping a record, and he has.

The second week of February, a year ago last February. Nothing dramatic happened that week. Nothing happened at all. That is precisely how he can date it.

Before that, for most of his life, there had been something. He would not have known how to describe it if you pressed him and he would have gotten embarrassed trying. A weight in a room. A line off a page that came up off the page and stood in front of him at five in the morning. Once, in a truck outside a hospital in a January he does not talk about, a sentence he did not compose arriving whole, and he sat there for eleven minutes and could not drive.

Since that second week of February there has been the page, and the five in the morning, and the chair, and nothing.

He has kept all of it. That is not a boast. He gets up at five because that is when he gets up. He reads the same way, and the words go in and lie down flat, and he closes it and goes out and does the day. Fourteen months. He has told exactly two people and both of them said something reasonable about dry seasons, and both of them were right, and neither one of them helped.

Here is what he did not expect, and it is the whole reason he is out in this pasture today with his hat in his hand.

He assumed it would fade. He had every reason to. That is what happens to a wanting that goes unanswered long enough. You bank it, you get on, you become the kind of man who used to feel things about God and now runs cattle. He had watched it happen to two men he respected and he had made a kind of grim peace with it happening to him.

It did not fade. It has gotten worse every single month.

Fourteen months into the silence he wants Him more than he did the morning in the truck outside the hospital. Not more sentimentally. More the way a body wants water. It has moved down into the middle of him where he cannot get at it, and it does not care one bit that there has been no answer, and it wakes up before he does.

This afternoon he came out to check the tank on the north eighty. Ground is pale and brittle and cracked and there has not been rain since the last week of May. He stood out in the middle of the open with the wind not yet up, hat in his hand, and he said out loud, to nobody, in a dry pasture at three in the afternoon:

I am hungrier than I was.

He called Himself food, out loud

There is a sentence in Amos that most people have only ever heard used as a threat, and buried inside it is one of the most astonishing things God ever says about Himself.

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.Amos 8:11

That oracle was spoken to a nation in a particular hour and the hour belongs to that nation. Take out of it the one thing it establishes about the nature of the thing, and hold that.

He calls the absence of hearing Him a famine.

Not a disappointment. Not a dip in enthusiasm. Not a season of reduced engagement. Famine, which is the word for a shortage of the thing a body cannot live without, the word that means people are getting thinner, the word nobody uses about a preference.

Which means the ache is not a malfunction and it never was. It is an instrument reading correctly. A body registers a famine of bread by getting hungry, and a person registers a famine of hearing Him the same way, and the reading you have been getting for fourteen months is accurate.

You are hungry because the instrument is working, and God is the One who installed it. I want that plain rather than hinted at. Amos 8:11 has God Himself naming a shortage of His words a famine, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old oracle off a prophet's tongue and lays it over a man standing in a dry pasture at three in the afternoon so he stops calling his hunger a defect.

And notice what that does to the shame. Nowhere in that sentence is the hungry person the problem. Nobody in a famine is scolded for being hungry. The hunger is the honest reading, and a man reading his own instruments right is not failing.

You have not been failing at a season. You have been reporting one accurately. His word treats hunger for Him as evidence of appetite rather than evidence of fault, and the Holy Spirit has not spent these fourteen months waiting for you to be quieter about it.

Aimed, and not cured

Here is the part where a piece like this usually offers to fix you, and this one will not.

I am not going to end your hunger. I would not if I had the means, and I want to say why plainly rather than leave you to work it out. The hunger is the best aimed thing you own. It is the part of you that is pointed at Him, and it got that way honestly, and taking it off you would be doing you an injury while calling it a kindness.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.Matthew 5:6

Read the tense of the blessing. He does not say blessed are they who used to hunger and got it sorted. The blessing sits on the ones who are hungering, in the middle of it, mouth open. And the filling He names does not cancel the hungering, because a man who has been fed at noon is hungry again by supper and that is not a spiritual failure, that is how a living thing works.

You are blessed in the hungering itself and not in some later state you have not reached. Matthew 5:6 is written in the present participle and the Holy Spirit does not read it to you as a warning about how long this is taking.

There is one more thing to get out of the way, because it has been sitting on you since February. Nothing in this message tells you the quiet is a verdict on you. Scripture does not once make the ache of a hungry person the evidence against them, and any explanation of your silence that ends with you being the reason for it did not come from His word and does not have to be carried out of this room. Why He is quiet is His, and He does not owe a man in a pasture the reasoning. What He does say, in writing, is what He calls the ache, and He calls it famine, which is the language of somebody who takes it seriously.

You are carrying an aim, and an aim is not a wound even when it hurts like one. Amos 8:11 puts hearing Him in the same category as bread, and the Holy Spirit is the One holding the aim steady in you through months when nothing at all has come back down the line.