She fed everybody in that building for two and a half years and she has no memory of eating.
That is not a metaphor she is proud of. It is just the most accurate sentence she has. People came to her, and she gave them what she had, and it was real and it helped and she does not take any of it back. And she went home and there was nothing, and she got up and did it again.
Somewhere in the middle of it she stopped asking God for anything for herself. Not in protest. It just felt pointless, the way it feels pointless to ring a number that has been disconnected.
And she reached a settled understanding, which she has never once said aloud, that God had walked out on her personally while continuing to work through her publicly. That He was using her and not with her. She could not find anybody to say that to who would not have been frightened by it.
If you carried people through a season while privately certain nobody was carrying you, sit down here with me. Nothing you did in that stretch is being graded, and nothing about it is going to be explained.
Used and with are not two categories
Let us look straight at the sentence, because it has been sitting in a woman for years without ever being said where anybody could examine it.
He was using me and He was not with me. It sounds precise. It sounds like the kind of hard truth a serious person accepts about themselves. And there is no such arrangement anywhere in Scripture, not once, not in a single life recorded in it.
What actually happened is simpler and has no theology in it at all: giving out for two and a half years empties a person, and an empty person has no instrument left for detecting anything.
You were not being used at arm's length. Nothing about running empty was God working through you while standing off from you, and nothing in that stretch put you outside His reach. I am not saying it to console you. The written word says he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5), stated as an arrangement rather than as a reward for having something left, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it true in a woman with no memory of eating.
What He did for the prophet who had had enough
Here is what steadied me, and it is not a comment on how you served.
There is a man who has just had the biggest public day of his ministry, fire on a mountain in front of a nation, and within a day he is running, and then he is under a tree asking to die.
And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.1 Kings 19:5
Read what heaven does with a burnt out prophet. No rebuke. No sermon. No question about his commitment. Food, and water, and sleep, and then more food, and only after all of that a conversation.
He was not asked to explain himself first. He was fed by somebody who had come to where he was lying.
You were attended to in that stretch whether or not you could feel it, and the Word shows heaven's first response to an emptied servant being bread rather than correction. That is written down in exactly that order, and the Holy Spirit is what drives it home in a woman who fed a building and does not remember eating.
Nothing is being added to your two and a half years
Something must be said plainly, because this is where somebody usually starts explaining.
I am not going to tell you what that stretch was for. Not humbling you, not teaching you dependence, not preparing you for a wider work. Every one of those turns a woman's exhaustion into somebody else's illustration, and none of the people who say it were carrying your Tuesdays.
You have one claim in this article and it is the whole of it: He was there. Nothing else is being said about your season. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence (Psalm 139:7), asked as a question with no answer available anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit who was in that hall on the nights nobody stayed to help stack chairs.
And if that stretch left more behind than anybody in that building knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please tell 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.
Here is the turn, then, and it is not an explanation, because I have not got one and I will not build one.
God was in that place and you did not know it. He was near you on the emptiest night of that stretch, and nothing that happened there put you outside His reach. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart (Psalm 34:18), which puts His nearness exactly where an emptied woman will not look for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that true about your actual two and a half years rather than about tired people in general.
I cannot tell you what God does next, or why that stretch went the way it went. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that using and being with were never two separate arrangements, and that heaven's first move toward an emptied servant in the Word was to hand him bread.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You speak these standing in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of what you had left to give. What it rests on is the written word, and what makes it living is the Holy Spirit rather than merely dutiful, and what God does next, and when, is His, in His own way, and nothing written here knows what that is.
- Stretch I kept ministering through, you are a season of my life and you are not the year God walked out on me. First Kings 19 has heaven's first move toward a burnt out prophet being bread and water and sleep, and the Holy Spirit put the food before the conversation on purpose. In the name of Jesus I stop reading you as abandonment.
- Sentence that He was using me and not with me, God's word about me does not read like you, and you are not standing in this hall tomorrow. Hebrews 13 says He has said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee, put as an arrangement and not a reward for having something left, and His Spirit was here on the nights nobody stayed to stack chairs. I am naming the stretch out loud tonight.
- Father, You are nigh unto the broken hearted, and Psalm 34 puts Your nearness exactly where an emptied woman will not look for it. I thank You that Your Spirit fed me for two and a half years while I had no instrument left to notice. Here is the season by its dates, out loud, and here is one sentence to You about it.
1 Kings 19:5
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
