The room has two armchairs and a low window and a clock that does not tick loudly enough to be annoying, which she suspects was a decision.
She has been going once a month for two years. The woman she sees is seventy-one and says almost nothing, and the almost nothing has, on at least four occasions, taken the top of her head off.
But that was the first year.
This last stretch, she has walked up the path four times running with nothing.
Nothing has happened. Nothing has moved. She prays the way she has prayed for eighteen months and it is neither better nor worse. She reads the same amount, feels the same amount, which is not much, and comes out roughly where she went in. The last genuine thing she can point to was in November and it was small.
And she sits in the armchair and says, I am sorry, I do not really have anything again.
The seventy-one year old says that is fine, in a tone that is genuinely fine, and then there is a silence that she has begun to find unbearable.
Because somebody has kept an afternoon free. There is a pot of tea. This woman has given her nearly two years of Wednesdays and the last four have been a person sitting in a chair having nothing to say about God.
She has started composing things on the walk up. Small things. A thought she had about a verse. Something a colleague said. Not lies exactly, but arranged, so there is something to put on the table.
And last Wednesday she caught herself doing it at the corner by the postbox, and stopped, and stood there, and felt something go through her that was very close to grief.
Nobody ever asked the branch for a report
Let me say first that the composing at the postbox is not a character flaw.
Wanting to bring something to somebody who has given you their Wednesdays is decent. It comes out of gratitude, not vanity, and the fact that it turned into something you had to catch yourself doing does not make you a fraud. It makes you a person who does not like taking without giving, which is not the worst thing to be.
But hear this, and take it as already settled rather than as reassurance: you were never the one supposed to be producing anything. You are not falling behind in a process that measures output. That is not my kind framing of four thin Wednesdays, it is what stands written in John's fifteenth chapter, where the Lord gives a branch exactly one instruction and it is not to produce, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that image is the one who has been holding you in place for eighteen unremarkable months.
Read the instruction, and count how many verbs are given to the branch.
Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.John 15:4-5
Remain. That is the verb, four times over. The fruit is mentioned, but never once as a thing the branch is told to do, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes what is written there live in an ordinary person.
A branch cannot make fruit. It has no capacity for it whatsoever. What it can do is stay attached, and everything else is the vine's business, and the Lord does not appear to consider this an unsatisfactory arrangement. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings fruit up through a branch that has done nothing all season but stay.
So the four Wednesdays with nothing on the table are not four failed sessions. They are four months of remaining, and this is yours right now rather than something to work up to: the staying is the obedience, because the written word gives the branch one job and the Spirit of God is the one who bears the fruit through it.
Now the harder thing, and it is the thing you felt at the postbox.
What went through you there was not shame, though it dressed as shame. It was closer to grief, and grief is what a person feels when they let go of something. You have been carrying a picture of yourself as somebody who has things to bring, and it has been quietly slipping for four months. The written word says He gives His beloved sleep, and the Holy Spirit takes a picture like that off a person gently and over a long time.
Let it go. That picture was never the arrangement.
There is a stretch in almost every long walk with God where the interesting part stops and the remaining begins, and people leave in droves at exactly that point because nothing appears to be happening and the culture has taught everyone that nothing happening is a problem to be solved. Scripture never says that anywhere. What is written is that those who wait on the Lord renew their strength, and the Holy Spirit does not require a report from the waiting to count it.
And your seventy-one year old knows this. That is why the fine was genuinely fine, and why she has not filled the silence. She has been through this stretch and she is not worried, and she is not sitting there hoping you will bring her something better next month.
So walk up the path empty.
Not resigned, and not as somebody who has given up on anything happening. Empty on purpose, because that is the honest condition and because the arrangement never required otherwise.
You are remaining. That is already true of you rather than pending a better month, because the word says remain in me and gives the branch nothing else to do, and the Holy Spirit is the one at work in you during exactly the stretches you would describe as nothing.
And say the true sentence when you sit down. Not the arranged one from the postbox. Something like: I have nothing again, and I have started to find that frightening. That is not a wasted Wednesday. That is the first genuinely new thing you have brought in four months, and it will be worth more to the woman in the other chair than any thought about a verse.
Then let the silence be long. She is not waiting for you to fill it. You are the only one in that room who thinks the hour needs justifying, and what is written is that in quietness and confidence is your strength, with the Holy Spirit doing the quiet work while nobody is talking.
Declare this over yourself
Then say these out loud. Know what they stand on: this authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King and not as somebody justifying an hour of somebody's afternoon. Every line rests on what is already written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it, never the sound of your own voice. You speak under His will, never over it, and however He answers, the outcome is His.
- Expectation that I arrive with something, you are set down at the door. Jesus gives the branch one instruction and it is remain, so four Wednesdays with nothing on the table are four months of doing the only thing I was asked to do.
- Fear that nothing happening means something has gone wrong, go, in the name of Jesus. A branch has no capacity to make fruit at all, and the vine has never once found that arrangement unsatisfactory.
- Lord, You are the vine and I am staying attached, and the composing at the postbox stops today. I am walking up that path empty, and I am going to say the true sentence when I sit down.
John 15:4-5
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