What Am I Supposed To Do With That

A woman prayed for her in June and said, at the end of it, that God is tender toward her.

And she said, out loud, immediately, before she had thought about it at all: "So what am I supposed to do with that?"

The woman laughed, kindly, because she thought it was a joke.

It was not a joke.

She has been turning that over ever since, because the question came out faster than any thought, and questions like that come from somewhere.

She is thirty two. She grew up in a house where everything true was also a job. Not a cruel house. A house where you were told the truth about a situation and then told what to do about it, and where a piece of information with no instruction attached would have been very strange, and where nobody ever handed anybody anything without also handing them the next step.

So that is her equipment. She has one slot, and everything that arrives goes into it, and the slot is marked what do I do.

She is a believer and a good one. When somebody tells her that God is holy, she asks what to do. When somebody tells her that God is faithful, she asks what to do. And those questions work, more or less, because there usually is something.

But God is tender toward you has no next step in it, and she went looking for one and found nothing, and rather than concluding that the sentence was a gift she concluded, silently, that she had not understood it properly.

That is the thing to notice. Faced with an unearnable kindness, she did not think, I am loved. She thought, I have missed something.

You know the slot. Yours may be marked differently. But you know what it is to receive a thing with nothing to do about it and to feel, obscurely, that you must be doing it wrong.

There is nothing in the verse to act on

Let me name the pit before we go to the text, because if I hand you a verse and you go looking for the action in it, this article will have made the problem worse.

The pit is not disobedience. You are among the most obedient people anybody in that building knows, and that is exactly the machinery we are dealing with. The pit is that you have one door into your own heart, and it is marked instruction, and anything that arrives without an instruction attached is left standing in the corridor because there is no other way in.

So here is a sentence with nothing in it to act on.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.Isaiah 66:13

Look for the imperative. There is not one.

Nobody is told to do anything. There is no condition. There is no next step, no response required, no application. It is a description of what God does, spoken by God, about God, and the person on the other end of it is not given a single task.

And notice who chose the comparison. God did, in the first person, in His own words, about Himself.

Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground the picture never travels without it. 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. Isaiah 66:13 is a simile God selected to say what His comfort is like. It does not make God a mother, He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the picture stays exactly the shape He gave it. Scripture uses a father's language for Him constantly and a mother's deliberately, and this is one of the motherly ones, and it is His.

Take that where you are sitting, and know it is not my reassurance, it is His own sentence. You are being comforted, and there is nothing for you to do about it. Isaiah 66:13 contains no instruction anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the comforting, and He is not waiting for you to work out the next step.