I Needed Them To Be New

The thing had happened on the Thursday and she had not told anybody in that building.

She is not going to tell you what it was either. It is the sort of thing that arrives by text at twenty past four in the afternoon and rearranges a life, and by Sunday she had slept about nine hours in total across three nights.

And she was on. She had been on that rota for years and it was her weekend and there was nobody to swap with by then.

So at half past six on the Sunday morning she sat in the car outside her own house with the engine off and did something she has done maybe four times in her life. She said, out loud: I need these words to be new this morning. Please.

Not a new song. She did not want new material. She wanted the ones she has sung since she was seventeen to arrive, at half past nine, like something she had never heard.

And they did not.

She stood up and led them and did it well and nobody in that room knew anything was wrong. And the whole way through, the words were exactly as old as they have ever been. Familiar. Worn smooth. Coming out of her mouth in the order they always come out in, with a slight edge of something she can only describe as embarrassment.

She got through the whole morning. Somebody thanked her at the door.

And in the car afterwards, with the keys in her hand and not in the ignition, what she said was: You did not do it.

The words were never the thing that arrives new

Let me stay in the car with you for a second before anything else, because that sentence deserves to be taken seriously and not tidied up.

You did not do it. You asked God for one thing, out loud, at half past six, on the worst weekend of your year, and He did not do it. That is what happened, and there is no version of this where somebody explains that away, and the fact that you said it to Him rather than about Him is closer to Jeremiah than to rebellion.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as an answer to the complaint: what you were reaching for is real and it does arrive, and it was never the words that were going to carry it. That is not my careful sidestep, it is what stands written in Lamentations, in the middle of the most bitter book in the Bible, and the same Holy Spirit who put that line in a book of ruins was in a car outside your house at half past six.

Read the sentence, and notice exactly what the writer says is new.

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

They are new every morning. His compassions. His mercies. Not the words. Never the words.

And read where he is when he writes it. He is looking at a burned city. He has spent two chapters cataloguing horrors and he goes back to cataloguing them a few verses later. This is not a man having a good day, and the newness he is describing is not a feeling he woke up with.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better Sunday: the newness you asked for exists and it was on its way, and it was never scheduled to arrive through your vocabulary, because Scripture attaches the word new to His compassions and not to anybody's phrasing, and the Spirit of God is the one who delivers it.

Now let me say what was actually happening at half past nine, because you have read it as absence.

You stood in front of a room having slept nine hours in three nights, four days after a text that rearranged your life, and you led them well, and nobody knew. That took something. Where did it come from?

Not from you. There was nothing in you that morning. What held you up was a set of worn words that you did not have to compose, in an order you did not have to choose, on a morning when you could not have generated one original sentence about God if your life had depended on it.

That is the mercy. It arrived. It came in exactly the shape you were not looking at, which is what mercy tends to do. What is written is that His strength is made perfect in weakness, and the Holy Spirit carried a woman through ninety minutes on words she has been storing since she was seventeen.

And the guard: none of this is God declining to make anything new for you. He does. People are met freshly all the time and there is nothing wrong with wanting it. Ask again, as often as you like. Just do not read the flat morning as a refusal, and do not read a familiar word as an empty one.