Threshing In The Winepress

The light in there is bad and he has never fixed it, and if he is honest the bad light is part of why he uses that corner.

What he does is small. He is not going to dress it up. Three mornings a week he opens the side door of a building that used to be something else, and he puts the heating on for an hour, and he makes about nine cups of tea, and he sits with whoever comes.

Usually two people. Sometimes nobody, and he has learned not to mind that as much as he did.

He does not tell people about it. When somebody at church asked him last year what he was up to these days he said bits and pieces, and he has thought about that answer more than a man ought to think about two words.

He was somebody once. That is the shape of the thing under all this. There was a decade where he ran what everybody in the county would have called a real work, with people and money and a name over the door, and it ended the way those things end when the man in the middle of them gets ill for eighteen months.

The sentence in the bad light is not nobody notices. It is: if what I am doing were of any size, it would not be happening in a corner.

You know that corner. It might be a room, or a phone call, or a person you visit that nobody knows you visit. There is a small good thing going on in your life in a place nobody looks, and the hiddenness of it has become, in your own thinking, a report on its value.

What he was called while he was hiding

There is a man in Judges beating out wheat in a winepress, which is a strange sentence unless you know that a winepress is a hole in rock, and that you thresh in the open where the wind can carry the chaff off, and that a man threshing in a hole is a man hiding.

He is hiding from raiders. He is doing a job badly, in the wrong place, out of fear, and that is where he is when he is addressed.

The angel calls him a mighty man of valor while he is down that hole, which is either a joke or the single most useful thing in the chapter. And then:

And the LORD looked upon him, and said, Go in this thy might, have not I sent thee?Judges 6:14

Go in this thy might. Not: go and get some might. Not: go once you are in better shape. The might referred to is whatever the man currently has, which at that moment is enough to thresh a small amount of wheat in a hole in the ground.

You are sent in the strength you actually have, and the sending has never once waited for you to have more. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man with a bad light and a kettle, and the Holy Spirit who moves you to open that door three mornings a week is the evidence that the smallness was never a disqualification.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic in that corner. If a man in a hole is sent in the might he has, then a side door and nine cups of tea is information about a building and a room and an hour of heating. It is not a report on the size of what God is doing, and it never had the standing to become that.

Nobody here is promising you a bigger room

Here is the second thing, and it is where this could turn into exactly the wrong kind of encouragement.

Nothing on this page will tell you that the corner grows. Nothing here says that God is preparing you for something larger, or that this is a season before an increase, or that faithfulness in small things always leads somewhere visible. Those sentences are common and they are cruel in a specific way: they make the corner acceptable only as a stage on the way to somewhere else.

The text does not do that with Gideon either. He is not told what happens next. He is told that the might in his hand is what he is going with.

You have been carried through every one of those mornings, including the ones where nobody came, and the carrying was not weighted by attendance. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in that room rather than waiting for the work to reach a respectable size.

There is something else, and it matters. Bits and pieces is not what you are doing. You know it is not. And the reason you gave that answer is not humility, it is that you did not want to watch somebody's face while you described it.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought in a badly lit corner. 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 thought about while the kettle boils. And the thing in the way is not the building and it is not the ending of the old work. It is a sentence: if this were of any size it would not be in a corner. 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 holding a kettle. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how many people came.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than obscurity, 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.