The Feeling That Did Not Come

She planned it properly, which is what she is like.

Not a party. She was very clear with herself about that, because it was not that kind of thing and she did not want anybody else there. She got the good glasses down. She made the thing her mother used to make. She put the little speaker on the counter and picked what would be playing, and she put the good tablecloth on for one person.

Because after eleven years, that week, Nadia had finally understood something and believed it, and she had believed it in a way that was different from all the times she had said she believed it, and she wanted to mark the day.

So she sat down at a set table on her own on a Tuesday evening with the light going and the music on.

And it was fine.

That is the honest word for it and it is the word she has been unable to get past ever since. It was fine. The food was good. The music was well chosen. She sat there for about forty minutes, and at some point she noticed she was mentally going through tomorrow, and she caught herself and came back, and it was still fine.

She had expected, without ever admitting she expected it, to weep. Or to be flooded with something. Or at minimum to feel unmistakably that a door had opened.

She felt exactly the way she feels on a Tuesday.

If you have set a table like that, or its equivalent, and had nothing arrive, this is written for you. And I want to start with the strangest and most freeing thing in the verse, which is that nobody in the history of the world has ever felt this particular thing happening to them.

Nobody feels being made alive

Here is the sentence.

And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses.

Quickened is an old word and it means made alive. And I want you to notice the position of the person it happens to.

Being dead. That is the state described, and it is the state in which the action is performed. Not weakened. Not struggling. Dead, which in this passage is a description of capacity rather than an insult, and it means specifically that the person had no part in the operation whatsoever.

Now think about what that rules out.

Nobody has ever experienced being made alive. Not the widow's son, not Lazarus, not anybody. Every account we have of it in Scripture is written from the outside, by witnesses, because the person it happened to was, by definition, not available to observe the process. What they can report on is the afterward. The event itself has no interior.

So a woman sitting at a set table waiting to catch herself being made alive is waiting for the one experience that has never been had by anybody.

You are on the receiving end of an act performed on people who were in no condition to register it. Colossians 2:13 says being dead and then says quickened, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written act and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it registered on a Tuesday.

And there is a real mercy in that, though it takes a minute to feel like one. If the making alive had an interior, then the quality of a person's inner life would be diagnostic, and everybody with a flat temperament or a hard month or a chemistry that does not do peaks would have grounds for genuine doubt.

It has no interior. That is not a disappointment. That is the reason it is available to everybody.

You have been made alive by a work with no interior to it, and that is precisely why nothing about your temperament could disqualify you. It is written as something done to the dead, and His Spirit is the one carrying a finished act into a life, which is why it holds at a table where nothing at all arrived.

All is a quantity word

Then the end of the sentence, and it is one small word doing a great deal.

Having forgiven you all trespasses.

All. Not only the ones brought that week. Not only the ones a person could name at a table with the good glasses out. All of them, as a completed quantity, in a participle that sits behind the main verb, which is to say: the forgiving is described as already accomplished before the making alive is even mentioned.

That ordering matters. It is not that she was made alive and now must work through a backlog. The forgiving is in the past participle. It is the ground the main verb stands on.

You have all of it forgiven as a completed quantity, and the completing happened before anything else in that sentence. Scripture puts the forgiving in the participle behind the main verb, and the same Spirit at work through that letter is the one testifying to it inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle, in plain sight. If the flatness has gone on and gotten heavier, if the nights have stretched, or if the thinking has traveled past disappointment and out toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Call your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be in it with you. That is not a lesser thing than prayer and it is not a fault in your faith. God has always worked through people, and one across the table from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

A celebration of something real

Now here is where I want to be careful, because this is where an article like this usually oversells.

I am not going to tell you the feeling turns up next month. I do not know. It might arrive on a Thursday in a supermarket for no reason at all, the way these things sometimes do. It might not arrive, and there are people who have walked with God for decades without the confirmation they were promised by somebody who should not have promised it.

What I will tell you is that the dinner was not wasted, that it was not a mistake, and that nothing about setting it was naive.

You marked a real thing. The reality of what you marked has nothing to do with what arrived at the table, because the event you were celebrating was not scheduled to arrive at the table. It had already happened, and the marking was correct, and correct is not the same as felt.

You were celebrating something entirely real, and the ordinariness of the evening was never a review of it. Colossians 2:13 describes the act as finished before the sentence ends, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a person.

And to anybody who has quietly concluded from a flat Tuesday that they must not really have understood after all: nothing about the flatness is evidence. It does not mean the week before was imaginary. There is nothing to go back and redo more sincerely.

You understood it, and the absence of a flood is not a defect in you or in what you understood. The written sentence attaches no feeling to itself anywhere, and it is His Spirit and not your capacity to be moved who makes a finished thing genuinely finished.