The Drive Home After the Testimony

They asked her in June and she said yes, and then she thought about it for four months.

What happened to her happened in a hospital corridor at a quarter to five in the morning, eight years ago, and she has told two people about it properly and neither of them is family.

She wrote it out. She timed it. She cut it from nine minutes to six because they had asked for six and she is not the sort of person who takes eight.

And on the Sunday she stood up in front of about four hundred people and told it, and she did it well. Her voice held. She did not cry, which she had been afraid of, and she did not overdo it, which she had been more afraid of. Afterwards a woman she did not know held both her hands for a while and could not speak, and that was the realest thing that happened all morning.

And on the drive home, at the second roundabout, it hit her.

That was not it.

Not that she had lied. Every fact was accurate. But the thing that had happened in that corridor was not made of facts, and what she had put in front of four hundred people was a shape with all the right measurements and nothing inside it, and she had spent four months polishing it into exactly that.

She got home and did not go in for a while.

And the sentence that has been with her since, that she has told nobody because of how it sounds, is this: I stood up in front of four hundred people and made God smaller.

Nobody has ever managed to say it, and that is in the Psalms

Let me deal with the accusation directly, because it is a serious one and it deserves a serious answer.

You did not make God smaller. That is not within your power and it is not within anybody's. A person can give a thin account of something enormous, and the enormity is entirely unaffected by the account, and if it were not so then every sermon ever preached would have been quietly reducing Him for two thousand years.

Hear this, and take it as settled rather than as reassurance: His greatness cannot be got to the bottom of, by you or by anybody. That is not my kind framing of a hard drive home, it is what stands written in the hundred and forty-fifth Psalm, where David says outright that God's greatness is unsearchable, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line was in a hall with four hundred people while you spoke.

Read the verse, and notice that it is a song of praise and not an apology.

Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom.Psalm 145:3

No one can fathom. Written by the best songwriter in the book, in the middle of a psalm that spends every other line trying to.

He is not complaining about a limitation. He is naming the size of the subject as one of the reasons to praise. The unsayable part is not the failure of the psalm, it is the point of it.

So this is yours right now rather than pending some better telling: the corridor is intact. Nothing you said or failed to say on that Sunday touched it, because the written word says His greatness cannot be fathomed and the Spirit of God is the one who holds what six minutes could not.

Now let me say what actually happened at that roundabout, because it was not failure. It was measurement.

For eight years you carried that corridor without ever putting it up against anything. Then you compressed it, deliberately, into six minutes, and for the first time you saw the difference between the thing and the container. That gap has always been there. You had simply never seen it, because you had never tried to pour it.

What you felt at the roundabout was not the story shrinking. It was you finding out how big it is.

And here is the part that will take the sting out for good. That woman who held both your hands and could not speak did not receive your six minutes. She received something through them. What is written is that the Spirit bears witness with our spirit, and the Holy Spirit is entirely capable of carrying more into a room than the speaker put into the sentences.