If Thy Presence Go Not With Me

She ran the question on herself in the car and she has not been able to put the answer down since.

It was not a spiritual exercise, it was almost idle. She had been listening to somebody talk about wanting God for His own sake, and she was agreeing with it, and then she thought: all right, test it.

So she put it to herself directly. If God said to you now, plainly, you can have the thing you have been asking for, exactly as you asked, and I will not be coming with you, would you take it.

And the answer arrived before she had finished forming the question, and the answer was yes.

Not a considered yes. An instant one, from underneath, of the kind you cannot argue with because it got there before you did.

She is forty-seven. She has been a Christian since she was nineteen, she leads something at her church, and she has said the words about wanting God more than His gifts out loud in front of other people more than once and meant them at the time.

And she cannot unknow the yes. It has been about five weeks.

If you have run that question and got that answer, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to be shocked by you.

The offer was made and it was a real offer

Here is the scene, and the striking thing about it is that God actually made the offer she imagined.

Israel has just made the calf. God says to Moses: go up to the land. I will send an angel before you, I will drive out the nations, it will be a land flowing with milk and honey.

Everything promised, delivered in full. And then one clause: I will not go up in the midst of thee.

The entire outcome, without the presence.

And this is what Moses says back.

And he said unto him, If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.Exodus 33:15

He turns it down. He looks at the land, the deliverance, the whole of what he has been working toward for years, and he says: not without You.

Now here is the thing she needs, and it is not that she should be Moses.

Moses is not displaying a natural human preference. He is at the end of a long road with God and he is speaking out of the most unusual relationship in the Old Testament, and the text says a few verses earlier that God spoke to him as a man speaks to his friend.

He did not arrive at that answer by testing himself in a chariot. He arrived at it by years.

You are looking at where a road ends rather than at an entrance exam, and it was already the far end of a long walk. Exodus 33:15 is where that sits, spoken by a man described as speaking with God face to face, and the same Spirit who moved somebody to record the offer and the refusal is the one who keeps a woman in a car from concluding she is a fraud.

The yes is information about distance, not about authenticity

Now the five weeks, because the five weeks are the problem rather than the answer.

She has been treating the yes as a revelation of her true self, as though everything before it was a performance and the car was the moment the mask came off.

That is not what it is. The yes is a reading of where she is on a road, taken honestly, at forty-seven, and it tells her one thing: she is not at the end of it.

Nobody is born at the end of it. The preference for the gift over the Giver is the default condition of every human being who has ever lived, and it is exactly the thing a whole life with God works on, slowly, and the working is not finished in anybody.

And notice the thing that most people miss about her situation. She asked. Most people never do. A woman who runs that question on herself and reports the result honestly, and then cannot put it down for five weeks, is not somebody whose faith has been exposed as fake. She is somebody in whom the question has become live.

That is what the road looks like from the inside at the point where it starts moving.

You have a wanting that is already being changed, and it was already in progress before the car. He promised it, in the sentence about God working in a person both to will and to do of His good pleasure, where even the wanting is named as His work (Philippians 2:13), and His Spirit does not require a person to have arrived before He will keep going.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing on this site is a lever, and this article in particular is not suggesting that wanting God correctly is the technique that gets you the thing. That would be the same error in better clothes. There is no arrangement here in which the right desire produces an outcome.

And what you are asking for still matters. Nothing on this page dismisses it or suggests you should want it less.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You are fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's purity of motive.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.