He Is, And He Is Good

For thirty years she prayed on the back step at first light.

There was a shape to it. She would come out with the mug, the chipped one from the garden center with the wren on it, and she would stand on the third step down, the one that has worn smooth, and she would go through it in order.

First the names. Twenty two of them at the peak, in a fixed order, family first, then the street, then the ones she had promised. Then the things she said about God, four or five sentences she had put together over the years and never varied. Then the verses she claimed, including the one she claimed over her son every single morning without fail. Then a bit of quiet. Then in for the breakfast.

Twenty minutes. Thirty years. In frost, in rain, once in snow deep enough to come over the tops of her slippers.

The winter took it apart, and not in a way she chose.

She could not tell you the order it went in. The claimed verses stopped coming out first, some time in November, not because she stopped believing them but because saying them out loud had begun to feel like a man shouting instructions at a river. Then the four or five sentences about God went, one at a time, as each turned out to be a sentence she could no longer say with a straight face.

Then the names went. Not the people. She would have died for any one of them. But the list, the reciting, the twenty two in order, that went, and by February all she could manage was to hold them up in her chest without saying anything at all.

By the last week of the winter, what came out of her mouth on the third step, at first light, in the cold, was this.

You are there. And You are good.

Six words. Some mornings four, because two of them got swallowed.

She stood with the mug going lukewarm in her hands and felt like a fraud. Thirty years, and this.

And there is a phone call coming this year that she already knows the shape of. She has known since the spring. It has a rough month attached to it, and she has been counting toward it ever since.

That is the whole of the fear, and it is not really about the six words. It is that weather is coming, and two does not look like enough to stand in weather.

Count them

Somebody counted before she did.

There is a sentence in Hebrews that has been quoted at people for centuries, usually badly, and almost nobody stops to do the one thing it invites, which is to count the items on the list. So count them.

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.Hebrews 11:6

Two. He is. And He is a rewarder of those who seek Him, which in plain speech is He is good.

That is the list. That is the whole of what the verse names as what a person brings when they come to God, and there is no third clause tucked away at the end of it. You are standing on both of the two that Scripture itself counted out, and I did not arrange that to make you feel better, it is Hebrews 11:6 with nothing removed, and His Spirit, who set those two clauses down in that order, has kept both of them alive in you through a winter that took the rest.

Six words on a cold step is not a reduced version of the requirement. It is the requirement, said in her own words, before breakfast, in the frost.

Now the first half of that verse, because it has been used to hurt people and it should not be left lying around. Without faith it is impossible to please Him. Nobody on this page is going to tell you that you did not have enough faith, because that is not true and it never was, and it is not remotely what that sentence is doing. The verse is not setting a bar to clear. It is describing what coming to God consists of, in two items, the way a person might describe walking as putting one foot in front of the other.

You have not been failing an examination. The word does not hand anybody a score, and the Spirit who inspired that line has spent two thousand years carrying it to people at the exact moment they were sure they had run out.

Here is what this message is not going to do, and I want to say it plainly, because a page that says the other thing is selling you something.

It is not going to tell you the twenty minutes comes back. I do not know that. Nobody writing a page like this knows that, and the promise would cost you nothing today and a great deal in about four months. What is actually on offer is smaller and it has the advantage of being true. The six words are not a waiting room. They are not a stage on the way to something bigger. You have a floor under you right now that is not a temporary arrangement, and that is what is written into the shortest creed in the New Testament, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over it waiting for you to add to it.

And now the fear itself, because the fear is wrong in an interesting way.

She is counting her two the way a person counts planks. Two planks will not hold anybody in weather, and about planks she is completely right. But He is and He is good are not two planks laid side by side. They are one Person, named twice. She is not standing on a short list at all. She is standing on Him, and you are standing on the same ground, and He does not get smaller when the sentence about Him does. That is not my reassurance. The word says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. He said it once, and His Spirit has never stopped saying it over a woman in slippers at first light.