All My Springs

At eleven forty at night Warren was at the desk in the corner of the spare room with the lamp on and the notebook open, and there was nothing in him to put in it.

He has written one line a night in that notebook for fourteen years. Not a journal. One line. Something he noticed, or something he was asking for, or a name. It started the winter his father died and it kept going through two moves, a layoff, his wife's surgery, and the year Micah was thirteen and nobody in the house was happy.

Fourteen years is about five thousand lines. He has filled six notebooks. This one is the seventh and he is a third of the way through it, and tonight he sat there with the pen uncapped for eleven minutes and put it back down.

Because he is the one. Every house that has any faith in it at all has somebody who is the one, and in this house it is him, and it has been him since the beginning and he has never once resented it.

He says grace. He is the one who knows when the thing at church is. He bought the good study Bible for the shelf in the living room that nobody has opened except him, and he did not make a comment about that, not one time, in nine years. He drove them all to the Christmas service every year including the two years Micah did not want to go and sat with his arms folded through the whole thing. He prays over the flu and over the car and over Lena's math test, out loud, briefly, without making it a production. He is not a fanatic. He is a maintenance man for a household's faith, and he has been doing the maintenance alone.

His wife believes. She would tell you so plainly if you asked. She is just quiet about it in a way that has never given him anything to hold.

And somewhere in the last six or eight months the bucket came up empty. Not a crisis. Nothing dramatic, no bitterness he can point at, no argument with God he could write down. He just reaches for the thing he has been drawing from for fourteen years and his hand comes back dry, and the notebook stays blank, and the grace before dinner comes out of his mouth in a voice he does not entirely recognize as belonging to a man who means it.

He capped the pen and sat there in the lamplight and thought the sentence he has been avoiding for weeks, which was: I think I have run out.

Then he heard Micah down the hall.

Micah is seventeen now and his light is always on and he is always on the phone. Warren was not listening on purpose. The door was open a hand's width because the door has been broken since the spring.

Micah was talking to a friend whose parents are splitting up. He was mostly listening, actually, doing that thing where you say yeah every so often to prove you are still there. And then, in the flat undramatic voice of a kid who has not thought about it at all, Warren heard him say: you want me to pray for you? Like, now?

Warren never taught him that sentence.

He has never said it to Micah in his life. He would not have known how without making it weird. He sat very still in the chair with the blank notebook in front of him and the lamp making its small circle on the desk, and he could not work out where his son had gotten it.

The spring was never in the house

There is a short psalm about the city of God that ends on a line singers have been carrying around for three thousand years.

As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there: all my springs are in thee.Psalm 87:7

All my springs. Not all my buckets. There is a difference and it is the entire difference, and a man who has been running a bucket line by himself for fourteen years will get it wrong in the same direction every time.

A bucket is a quantity. It has a bottom, it is portable, and when you have poured out what was in it you are done until somebody refills it. A spring is not a quantity at all. A spring is a place where water comes up out of the ground because of what is underneath, and it has no bottom in any sense a person carrying a bucket would recognize.

Warren has spent fourteen years being magnificently faithful with a bucket. And the reason the empty feels like a verdict is that somewhere in year three or year four, without ever deciding it, he started to think the water was his.

You are the light of the world, and Jesus said that about people rather than about their output. I am not saying it to get you back on your feet. Matthew 5:14 is written down as a flat statement of fact over a crowd of ordinary people, none of whom were having a productive season, and the Holy Spirit is what takes a line like that off a page and sets it on a desk at eleven forty at night.

Look at the source language in the verse itself. All my springs are in thee. In Him. Not in the man's discipline, not in his fourteen years, not in the notebook, and not in whether anybody else in the house ever opened the study Bible.

You have a source you did not install and cannot drain. Scripture puts it about as plainly as it can: the water that Christ gives shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life, John 4:14, written, and it says springing rather than stored on purpose. What the Spirit adds is that it is about you, tonight, with the pen capped.

Empty is not a verdict

Now the other thing, and this one has to be said carefully because it gets said badly.

There is a prophet in 1 Kings who has just come off the single most spectacular day of ministry in the Old Testament and who, one chapter later, is sitting under a tree in the desert asking God to take his life. He is empty. Completely. He tells God he is the only one left, which is not even accurate, but it is exactly what a person who has been the one for too long believes.

And God's response to him is not a correction. It is not a lecture about his supply. An angel wakes him up twice and gives him food and lets him sleep, and the whole first movement of God's answer to a burnt out man is bread and rest, 1 Kings 19:5 and following.

Rest is not a dimming. Nobody in that passage tells Elijah his light went out under the tree.

You were never the spring, and running dry has told you nothing about your standing. That is written into the sentence in Psalm 87:7 itself, and 2 Corinthians 4:7 says we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us, which is not an insult about the pot. His Spirit is agreeing with that over a man who has just discovered the pot has a bottom.

And I am not going to tell you when the notebook fills back up. I do not know. Anybody who puts a date on that is guessing, and God is not on a schedule you can be handed. What I can tell you is what does not depend on the water level.

You are held on a night when you have nothing left to hand anybody. Isaiah 40:11 says He carries the lambs in His bosom and gently leads those that are with young, and Deuteronomy 33:27 says underneath are the everlasting arms, both written, neither one conditional on a good week. The Spirit did not arrive when you were full and He did not leave when the bucket did.