Eighteen Years Of Watching

Five o'clock. Same window. He does not put the light on, because the light on the glass means you see yourself instead of the street.

It is a short street. Nineteen houses and a corner shop that has been four different things. He can tell you who is in every one of them, and who was in them before, and which two have changed hands three times.

He has prayed for that street since the spring of the year they moved in. He knows exactly when he started because he started the week after something happened at number seven that he will not describe, and he was thirty-nine, and he is fifty-seven now.

Eighteen years.

Here is the honest report, and he is an honest man, so he gives it to himself in the same words every time: nothing has changed. Number seven is worse. Two of the families he prayed for hardest have gone and he does not know where. The shop closed again in March. There is more of the thing he was praying against, not less.

He has never missed a season. He has missed mornings, plenty, but never a season, and there is a notebook with initials in it that goes back eleven years, and the earlier ones he cannot find.

The sentence at that window is not God has not answered. He is too careful a man for that. It is: eighteen years of breath, and there is nothing to hand anybody, not even to God.

You know that window. It might be a street, or a child, or a marriage, or a nation. There is a long watch in your life and no report to file, and you have started to feel that the watching itself is what has gone to waste.

He is collecting something other than results

There is a line in a psalm that is so strange that people usually read past it, and it is exactly for a man at a window.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Tellest means counts. So: You count my wanderings. Then a request, and then a question that is really a statement.

Think about what is being described. A God who keeps a record, and the record is not of achievements or answered requests or streets that improved. It is a record of the wandering and the weeping. The raw material of a hard eighteen years is the thing being collected and stored.

Nobody collects what is worthless. That is the entire argument of the verse and it does not need any help from me.

You are watched over by a God who has kept a record of eighteen years of your crying, and He has never once filed it under nothing. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing I chose for a man at five in the morning, and the Holy Spirit who has been at that window with you since the spring you were thirty-nine is the evidence that no morning of it went unnoticed.

Watch what that does to the report you give yourself. If the tears are in a bottle, then eighteen years with no visible change is information about a street, and a decade, and things far outside one man at a window. It is not a record of wasted breath, and it never had the standing to become that.

He does not owe you the outcome and He is not withholding it as a lesson

Here is the second thing, and there are two errors either side of it.

The first error is the one that has been resisted at that window for years: that if nothing came of it, the praying was pointless. That one has been fought honestly, and it is still being fought at five in the morning.

The second error is the one people will offer you as a rescue, and it is worse: that God is withholding the change on purpose, to teach you something, or to test you, or because there is a lesson in the eighteen years. That turns a street full of real people into a training exercise arranged around your development, and it is not in the text.

Scripture says God wastes nothing and that nobody can trace out what He is doing. It leaves the eighteen years honestly unexplained, and it says the tears are kept.

You have been carried through every one of those mornings, and the carrying did not depend on anything at number seven getting better. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been at work on that street rather than waiting for a man to pray more effectively.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to keep watching. Nothing here is asking for a nineteenth year. If you stop tomorrow morning and put the light on and never look at that street again you have not stepped one inch outside what God is doing.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought at a cold window. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not carried silently at five for eighteen years. And the thing in the way is not the street and it is not number seven. It is a sentence: there is nothing to hand anybody. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority in the dark in a dressing gown. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how many years were behind them.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than weariness, and there are mornings you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.