I Cannot Prove It And It Happened

The sentence is ready. It has been ready for about two years.

You know exactly how it starts, because you have started it in your head roughly four hundred times, usually in the car, occasionally at three in the morning, once in a car park when somebody asked how you had been and actually waited for the answer.

And then, before a single word gets out, the questions arrive. Not their questions. Yours, in their voice, which is worse and much faster.

What actually happened, though. Was it not just that things settled down on their own. You were in a bad way, so are you sure about what you remember. Right, but what would you say to someone who said it was a coincidence.

And the story shrinks while you are standing there. It goes from the thing that split your life into a before and an after, down to a shape you could defend in front of a mildly skeptical person, and by the time it reaches your mouth it has become: "I went through a rough patch and I came out of it."

Which is true. And which is nothing.

So you say that, and they say oh good, and the conversation moves on, and you drive home with the whole of it still sitting in your chest, unsaid, again.

The trouble is that the part that saved you is the part that would not survive a question. You cannot produce it. There is no photograph, no witness, no document, nothing you could put on a table. There is a night, and there is a thing that happened in it, and there is the plain fact that you are still here and you were not going to be.

You have started typing it to someone twice. Both times you deleted it before you sent it, and both times you felt something close to relief, and something a good deal worse underneath the relief.

The ransom was found by somebody else

There is a moment in the book of Job that almost never gets preached, and it is the most exact description of your situation in the whole Bible.

Elihu is describing a man who has gone right to the edge. Not metaphorically. The man is in a bed, his life is at the pit, and everything is nearly over. And then something happens that the man himself has no part in whatsoever.

Then he is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom.Job 33:24

Read the verbs and see who they belong to. He is gracious. He saith. He has found. Every single action in that verse is God's, and the man on the bed does not speak, does not agree to anything, does not qualify, and is not asked. The only thing attributed to him in the sentence is his going down to the pit, and that is the thing that gets stopped.

Which means the ransom you cannot produce was never in your keeping. You were reached in a transaction that happened over your head, and Job 33:24 records the finding as God's own, with the Holy Spirit putting that verse in front of you tonight rather than in front of the person who wanted a better answer.

I want to be careful here, because there is a cheap way to say this and I am not going to say it. Nobody is calling what happened to you luck. Nobody is calling it your resilience, or your good instincts, or the strength you found somewhere. Those explanations are offered kindly and they are all the same explanation, which is that in the end you did it, and if you had done it, you would be able to prove it. That is exactly why you cannot.

There is also a man in John's gospel who had precisely this problem and refused to solve it. They cross-examined him twice. They brought in his parents. They asked him to characterize the person who had healed him and he would not be drawn, and in the end he said the only thing he actually had: one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see. He never produced a mechanism. He produced himself.

You are standing exactly where that man stood in John 9:25, holding the same thin, unprovable, undeniable thing, and the same Spirit who steadied him in a room full of interrogators is the one steadying you in a car park.

Let me say one plain thing in the middle of this, because it belongs here. If the night you cannot talk about is close again, or if you have started thinking that everyone would manage without you, do not sit with that on your own until morning. Tell one living person tonight, whoever picks up: a friend, your doctor, a neighbor. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour, and anywhere else, emergency services or the crisis line in your country. Nobody has to prove they are bad enough to deserve that call. It is not a failure of faith and you were never a burden for making it. God has put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and His word has never treated a person reaching for a real hand as a person going around Him. The Holy Spirit moves through a night nurse and a helpline volunteer as surely as through any quiet prayer.

So the story does not need to get stronger before it gets told. You have been carrying a rescue that will not fit into evidence, and Job 33:24 shows a rescue that was announced rather than argued, with the Spirit of God standing behind the announcement and not behind your ability to summarize it.