She was nine, and she was under a chair, and she saw something she has never been able to explain.
She will not describe it in detail, because she has watched what happens when people describe those things, but she will tell you the effect. The whole shape of her life since has been set by twenty minutes in a room when she was nine years old.
She has wanted that ever since. She has organized herself around it. Every meeting she has driven to, every book, every fast, has had that room at the end of it.
And a month ago a friend asked her what she loves about God, and she started to answer and heard herself describing the room again, and stopped.
Because the honest question underneath is one she has not been able to shake since. Do I want Him, or do I want that. And I have been chasing it for twenty six years and I do not know the answer.
If your hunger was set by something you saw, come and sit down here with me. What you saw is not going to be doubted in this room.
What you saw was real
Let us settle that first, because everything else falls over without it.
I am not about to explain your room away. God moves in rooms, and a child who sees it is not deceived, and the twenty six years of hunger that came out of it were not built on nothing. The instinct that said, whatever that is, I want it, was a good instinct.
The complication is only this: an effect is easier to picture than a Person, so a young heart naturally organizes itself around the picture it has, and then keeps traveling toward the picture for decades.
You are not a fraud for having wanted the power. Nothing about that hunger has put you at a distance from God. I am not saying it to smooth this over. The written word says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights (James 1:17), which makes the gift genuinely good and names where it comes from in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit holds that steady in a woman who has just heard herself describe a room instead of a Person.
The one thing Scripture is blunt about
Here is what steadied me on this, and it is not a warning aimed at you.
There is a man in Acts who saw the Spirit given and wanted it so badly that he offered money for it. Peter answers him hard.
But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.Acts 8:20
Notice what Peter does not say. He does not tell him to stop wanting it. The rebuke lands on the idea that a gift of God is a possession to be got hold of, separated from the Giver and acquired.
And then read the next verse, where Peter tells him to pray, which means the door was not shut on the man at all.
You are not that man, and the Word never once told a hungry person to want less. That is written into the passage plainly, and the Holy Spirit sets that down in front of a woman who has been quietly afraid that her hunger was the wrong kind.
The room came from somewhere
Something has to go where the fear was, or you will spend the next month trying to purify your motives, which is a private audit nobody ever passes.
So let us name what is actually there.
You have access to the One the room came out of, and He was in it before anything happened in it. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the manifestation is His self disclosure rather than a commodity being distributed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who was the whole content of what you saw when you were nine.
And if these years have cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
So this is where it turns, and it is not a promise that the room comes back, because I have not been given that and I will not invent it.
God Himself is what comes down over your life, and He arrives in person. You are not waiting on a delivery, you are receiving the One who sends it. The written word says the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and dwelt is the word for pitching a tent where people actually live, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it true in your actual house tonight rather than in a meeting somewhere.
I cannot tell you what God does next, or when. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that the twenty minutes when you were nine were twenty minutes of Him, and that the hunger they left in you was never pointed at the wrong thing, only at the visible end of it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how pure your motives have been. The written word is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what keeps it living rather than merely hungry, and what God does next, and when, is His, in His own way and in His own time, and nothing on this page claims to know which.
- Room I saw when I was nine, you are a memory of God at work and you are not the whole of what I am allowed to want. James 1 says every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, which names the gift good and names the Source in one breath, and the Holy Spirit was the whole content of what I saw. In the name of Jesus I stop traveling toward the evidence.
- Fear that my hunger has been the wrong kind, you are a sentence God did not say, and you are not standing in this hall tomorrow. Acts 8 rebukes the idea that God's gift can be got hold of as a possession and then tells the man to pray, so the door was never shut, and His Spirit has carried twenty six years of my wanting. I am asking for the Giver tonight and not the evidence.
- Father, You were made flesh and pitched Your tent where people actually live, and John 1 says we beheld Your glory. I thank You that Your Spirit was in that room before anything happened in it, and that the manifestation was always Your self disclosure and never a commodity. Here is what I want, out loud and clumsy, and here is Your name after it.
Acts 8:20
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