I Cannot Name One Thing That Feeds Me

It was a good question from a friend who meant nothing by it, and she has been carrying it around like a stone in a coat pocket ever since.

They were walking. Her friend said: what keeps you going, though, with all of it?

And she gave an answer, and the answer was about discipline, and about habits she has kept for a long time, and about how she has always been the sort of person who does what she says she will do.

And she got home and sat in the car on the drive without getting out, because the honest version of her answer was: me. I keep me going.

She is not in crisis. Nobody looking at her life would see anything wrong with it. She prays. She goes. She is kind to people and she means it and she has held on through things that would have finished other people.

And when she goes looking for the source of any of it, she finds her own hands. Every single time. She can name what she does. She cannot name one thing being done to her.

She said, to the windscreen, in the dark: I do not know what is under me.

And that frightened her more than doubt ever has, because doubt at least has a shape you can argue with.

You know that drive.

Maybe you have been running on discipline for years without noticing it had become the whole of it. Maybe you would describe your faith warmly and accurately to anybody who asked and could not tell them what nourishes it. Maybe you have quietly assumed that this is what it is like for grown ups.

Nobody did this to you. It is the natural end of being capable. A capable person's supply problems get solved by the capable person, and after enough years nobody, including her, can see anything else at work.

The tree is not described by what it does

Here is a picture from Jeremiah, and the whole force of it is in what the tree is not credited with.

For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.Jeremiah 17:8

Read the verbs that belong to the tree. Planted, which is something done to it. Spreadeth out her roots, which is the one thing the tree does, and it is not work, it is growth in a direction.

And then read the results. Leaf green. Not anxious in a drought. Does not stop bearing.

None of that is achievement. Not one clause of it. The tree is not praised for its resilience and it is not described as disciplined. It is described as located.

You are planted by water, and what has kept you green through the years you were counting your own effort was the river and not the effort. That is what the picture says by putting every result down to position (Jeremiah 17:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the water in that picture everywhere it is used, which means the thing you have not been able to find was not absent, it was underground.

Roots do not report

Here is the practical reason you cannot name it, and it is not a fault in you.

A root does not send word up. There is no signal, no sensation, no notification that says: water reached you at four this morning. The tree does not know it is being fed. It only knows it is still green, and it usually cannot tell you why.

That is precisely why your inventory came back empty. You were looking for evidence in the one place that does not produce any.

You have been fed all along and you were never going to be able to see it happening, because that is not what roots do. Scripture says the wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit (John 3:8), and it is the Holy Spirit named there who is described in exactly those terms: real, working, and not visible at the point of operation.

And the graft is where this joins the rest of it. You were connected to a supply, and the connection is a fact about the tree rather than a feeling you are meant to be able to detect. The word says thou bearest not the root, but the root thee (Romans 11:18), and His Spirit is the life coming up through it, which has never once required the branch to be able to sense the sap.

Nothing here is against your discipline

I want to say this plainly, because it would be easy to hear this as a page telling you that twenty years of faithfulness were a mistake.

They were not. Your habits are good. The praying, the going, the doing what you said you would do, all of it is genuine, and this page is not handing you a suspicion about your own life.

You have not been faking anything, and your discipline was a real response and not a substitute for one. Scripture says be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord (1 Corinthians 15:58), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in every one of those mornings, including the ones where you experienced nothing at all and got up anyway.

The question is not whether you have been doing something real. It is whether you have been doing it alone, and you have not.