I Keep Auditing The Moment

It was a Thursday in a church hall with a bad ceiling and she has been back to it perhaps forty times.

Not in memory the way you revisit a good day. In the way an auditor goes back to a set of accounts.

She was twenty six. There were about thirty people. A woman she did not know very well prayed with her at the side of the room while the chairs were being stacked, and she cried, which she had not expected, and she went home and could not sleep and read the whole of John's gospel between midnight and about four.

That was nineteen years ago.

She is forty five.

And every three or four months, sometimes triggered by something and sometimes not, she goes back to that hall and takes it apart.

Was it emotion. The room was warm and she had been at a low ebb and the woman was kind, and any of those on their own could explain crying.

Did she understand what she was doing. She had read almost nothing at that point.

And the reading afterward, the whole gospel in four hours: was that God, or was it a woman who could not sleep and had a book?

She has never once got an answer. That is what makes it an audit rather than a memory. Forty passes over the same evening in nineteen years and it has never returned a finding in either direction, and she goes back anyway.

She said something to her friend on a walk in May, lightly, the way you do when you are testing whether a thing can be said. She said: I still do not know if that night was real.

And her friend said something kind and they walked on.

You know the audit. Yours may be a different evening or no evening at all. But you know what it is to go back and back to a piece of your own history looking for a verdict, and to have never once come away with one, and to keep going.

The doing is all on His side

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, and let me be careful, because there is a version of this article that tells a woman where she stands and I will not write it. I do not know, and no page can, and a stranger handing you a verdict would be one more thing to audit in three months.

The pit is not doubt exactly. It is a method. You have chosen a memory as the evidence base, and you have been running a proper, honest, rigorous examination on it for nineteen years, and the examination has returned nothing every single time.

An honest person would eventually ask whether the instrument is right for the question.

Here is the verse.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.John 3:6

Read what it makes the evidence.

The flesh produces flesh. The Spirit produces spirit. The whole of the sentence is about who is doing, and the doer is not the one being born.

There is nothing here about the room, the temperature, the ebb you were at, the kindness of the woman, what you understood, or whether you had read anything. None of those is mentioned, because the verse is not describing the conditions under which a person qualifies. It is describing where the action comes from.

And two verses on, Jesus says the wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it but cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes, and so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

He said that to a careful man who wanted something he could inspect. It is the least satisfying answer available to an auditor and He gave it deliberately.

Take that on the path, and know it is not my consolation, it is what is written. The doing in that sentence is all on His side, and an audit of an evening was never the instrument for this. John 3:6 puts nothing on the person born, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the birthing, and He does not file accounts.

You are not the evidence base for this, and you were never going to be. John 3:6 puts the whole of the doing on the Spirit and describes nothing about the one being born, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears witness, in His own time and by His own means.

And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The birth language in John is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.