It Charges Us For Being Open

Twenty to eleven on a Tuesday and the rain has not let up since four. The last order went out at half nine and the fryer is draining down. She is wiping the counter a second time because there is nothing else to do with her hands, he is out the back doing the trays, and neither of them has said anything for a while.

In the little hallway by the door there is a display with a number on it, and the number goes up. It goes up when the fryer is on. It goes up when the fryer is off. It goes up on a wet Tuesday with nobody in, because the supply itself carries a charge and the charge does not care whether anybody came.

That is the sentence that has sat in her chest since the spring, and it is not really about a meter. It charges us for being open.

They have prayed about this shop. Four years of it, mostly in the car outside the flat with the engine off, because the car is the only place the two of them are ever alone. She is not a woman with a thin faith: she sang on Sunday and meant it, and came in on Monday, and the number went up all weekend behind a locked door.

Then somebody sends her a link to a site called faith over poverty, and she reads that name standing next to a cooling fryer with a cloth in her hand, and she thinks: right. Go on, then. Tell me.

So let us be honest about the name over the door before we go one step further, because there is a hallway of your own tonight, or you would not have opened this.

What the name over this door is actually claiming

Faith over poverty does not mean faith removes poverty. It never has meant that. If somebody handed you that sentence, they handed you a thing the Bible does not say, and it has cost you years of quietly wondering what is wrong with you.

Let me name the heavier weight first, because on this ground we name the wound before we lift anything. It is not the meter. It is what grows underneath the meter: the suspicion that a real believer, a proper one, would not still be standing in that hallway, and that there is a key somewhere which was handed to other people and never to you.

So hear this said over you plainly, and hear it early. You are a believer, and your faith is real tonight, in that hallway, with the number going up behind you. That is not my encouragement and it is not my good opinion of you. It is what the written word says about people under long pressure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence like that off a page and into a person.

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.2 Corinthians 4:8 and 9

Count the pairs. He writes the pressure down first, every time, before he writes what it did not manage to do. Afflicted, and not crushed. Struck down, and not destroyed. He never claims the pressure lifted.

Where I grew up you could read the wind off a hillside by looking at the trees. The ones on the windward side grow with a lean in them, scarred along one shoulder, and they are alive. Standing is not the same thing as being sheltered. A tree that has taken a wind for twenty seasons and is still rooted was not spared anything. It held.

That is your tree. You are still rooted, and the lean in you is not a fault in you, it is the shape of somebody who stayed. 2 Corinthians 4:9 is written about people who were struck down and got up looking like it, and His Spirit is the one who has kept your roots in the ground through four winters of this.

Faith is not a lever on the meter

Now the honest half, and it is the half this whole site exists to say out loud. There is no arrangement anywhere in Scripture where believing harder converts into an amount. Not one page of it works that way, and the years spent hunting for the setting you missed were years spent hunting for a thing that was never fitted.

I am not going to tell you your shortfall is a message. I do not know that, nobody has been authorized to tell you it, and a reason handed over by a stranger is worth nothing on a Thursday. Nor am I going to swing the other way and leave faith looking like a warm feeling that moves no meters. That correction is as false as the thing it corrects.

So here is what is true, and here is where I will stand all night. You have a faith that is doing real work, and it is not the work of a lever. Romans 8:16 says the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and that witness is not switched off in the weeks when nobody comes through the door.

A lever moves a load in proportion to what is put into it. Faith is not shaped like that anywhere in the book. It is a hand: an open hand that takes hold of God Himself, which is why it goes on working perfectly in a hallway where nothing else is working at all.

You are holding on to God in the fourth year of a thing that has loosened stronger grips than yours. The written word calls that endurance and calls it blessed (James 1:12), and the Holy Spirit is not standing over the till with a red pen while you do it.

What is still standing at twenty to eleven

Let us do the arithmetic she is not doing, since somebody ought to.

She prayed in the car with the engine off. She came in on Monday. She sang on Sunday and meant it while the number climbed behind a locked shutter. She has not concluded that God is a fiction, which would be the tidier position from where she is standing, and she is still talking to Him.

That is faith standing up. You are not a person whose faith failed; you are a person whose faith has been carrying a load most people around you have never once had to pick up. Scripture never sizes faith by what it produced, it sizes it by whether it kept hold of the One who promised (Hebrews 10:23), and His Spirit has been holding the other end of you the whole time.

Here is what the name over the door does claim, inside its rights. Poverty does not get to defeat your faith, say what you are worth, or have the last word about your life, because there is a longer document than a night's takings and God wrote it. You were bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20), that price is not revised down on a wet Tuesday, and the Holy Spirit is the witness of it inside you on the days you cannot feel a thing.

And if this has gone past money and into danger, if the home is going or there is nothing in the flat to eat, then reach for real help today and reach without a shred of shame. That is not a lack of faith. Faith has hands, and hands are for using.