The Weather That Did Not Break

It has been building since Sunday. Anybody could tell you that. The sky has had that low green edge on it away to the west since about four on Sunday afternoon and the air has been sitting on the place like a hand.

Three days. The forecast has said it every day and moved it every day, and this evening it says nine o'clock, and it is twenty past, and Harlan is on the porch with his boots off, looking at it.

He knows exactly what he is doing out here and he would not say it to anybody.

There was a thing. He took it to God in February and he did it the way you do a thing you have decided to do properly. He has not gone back to it and he does not intend to. He believes he was forgiven and he would say that plainly to his pastor or his brother or anybody who asked.

And nothing has broken.

That is the whole of it, and the sky is a very good picture of it, which is why he keeps coming out here. Everything says it should have gone by now. Everything is right for it. And the pressure sits exactly where it sat on Sunday, and a man stands on his own porch at twenty past nine waiting for the air to change.

Now if that is your porch, this is written for you, and the first thing I want to hand over is the order of the words in one sentence, because the order is the whole argument and almost every person I have ever met has it backwards.

Read the order

Here is the verse.

I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and, as a cloud, thy sins: return unto me; for I have redeemed thee.

Now, most people hear that and reconstruct it in their heads as: return to me, and I will blot out. That is how we expect it to go. That is how every human arrangement goes. You come, and then the thing gets dealt with.

That is not the order in the sentence.

I have blotted out comes first. Return unto me comes second, and it comes with a for in front of it, which is a word that supplies a reason. The invitation is issued on the strength of something that is already done.

He is not saying come and I will deal with it. He is saying I have dealt with it, so come.

And that changes what a man is doing on a porch, because a man waiting to feel something before he can believe he has been received is standing in the wrong half of the sentence.

You are being invited on the strength of something that was finished before the invitation was issued. Isaiah 44:22 puts the blotting out first and the returning second with a reason word between them, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written order and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands on a porch at twenty past nine.

I want to say something about the waiting, because I have done it and I would not have anybody feel foolish. Waiting for the air to change is not unbelief. It is what a person does who has been taught, somewhere along the way, that an internal shift is the confirmation. That is a teaching problem and not a character problem, and it has been handed on by good people who did not know they were doing it.

You have been standing in the second half of a sentence whose first half was already settled, and the standing was taught rather than chosen. It is written with the completed act in front, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written order into a life, which is why it holds on an evening when the pressure has not moved an inch.

A cloud looks solid from underneath

Now the image, and it is chosen with more care than people give it credit for.

I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions.

Two things about a cloud.

The first is what everybody notices: it goes. A cloud is the standing example of a thing that looked like weather and turned out to be temporary.

The second is the one that matters more for a man on a porch. From underneath, a cloud does not look temporary at all. From underneath, a thick cloud looks like a ceiling. It looks solid, it looks fixed, and it looks like the permanent condition of the sky. Nobody standing under one has ever been able to see the edge of it.

And that is exactly the position of a person who believes a thing has been dealt with and cannot feel any difference. From underneath, the weight looks like the ceiling. It looks like the way things are.

The verse does not say the cloud will look thin. It says it has been blotted out. That is a statement about what has happened to it, made by somebody who is not standing underneath it.

You are under something God has already described in the past tense, and the view from below was never the report on it. Scripture says I have blotted out and chooses the one image everybody has stood under, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can miss it. If the standing out on the porch has stretched into something heavier, if the nights have gotten long, or if the thinking has traveled past disappointment and out toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Ring your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or a crisis line and let another human being be in it with you. That is not the smaller road and it is not a soft spot in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people.

Return is not a feeling

And here is where I want to be straight with you rather than warm.

I am not going to tell you the weather breaks tonight, and I am not going to tell you it breaks in you either. I do not know. It might. Some people get the shift and some people get a lifetime of ordinary faithfulness with nothing dramatic in it, and the second group are not the ones who did it wrong.

What I will tell you is what return means in that sentence, because it is not a feeling and a lot of people have quietly assumed it was.

Return is a direction. It is a word about which way a man is facing and which way he is walking. It has nothing at all to say about the weather while he walks. A man can return to God in a completely flat state, on a Tuesday, on a porch, and the returning is not diminished one degree by the flatness, because turning is a thing a body does and not a thing a chest reports.

You are already turned toward Him, and turning has never once required the air to change first. Isaiah 44:22 makes return an instruction about direction on the ground of a finished act, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a person.

And to the man who has begun to suspect that nothing took in February: nothing about the unchanged pressure is evidence. It does not mean you were casual, or that it needs doing again more thoroughly. There is nothing to redo.

You were redeemed, and the absence of a shift is not a shortfall in you or in what was done. The written sentence ends with for I have redeemed thee in the completed tense, and it is His Spirit and not your ability to notice Him who makes a finished thing genuinely finished.