Still Wet With It

Esperanza saw her number on the board at eleven minutes past ten and did not tell a single person until twenty-two minutes past.

She has thought about those eleven minutes more than she has thought about the result.

It was a corridor with a noticeboard in it and about forty people crowding, and there was screaming, because there is always screaming, and somebody's mother was crying by the water cooler, and Esperanza found her number and read the line beside it twice and then stepped backwards out of the crush.

She went outside. She sat on a low wall in the sun by the bike racks and she put her bag between her feet and she did not get her phone out.

Her friend Wren found her there eleven minutes later and said, "Well?"

And Esperanza said, "Yeah."

Wren screamed. Wren is a screamer. And then it was everybody's, in the way it becomes everybody's, and it was wonderful, and she rang her father and he had to put the phone down and come back to it, and her aunt sent eleven messages in a row each containing one word.

But she says the wall is the part.

She could not explain it for a long time and she has an explanation now that she is fairly happy with. She says that from twenty-two minutes past onward, the good news was a thing she was managing. Reactions to receive. People to remember to tell. Her cousin who did not get in, and how to be about that.

And from eleven minutes past to twenty-two minutes past it was not any of that yet. It was just true, and she was sitting in the sun with it, and it was still wet.

She says she said something on that wall. Not much. She says she is not sure she would call it a prayer and she is not sure she would not.

You have had eleven minutes like that, or you have skipped them. Something lands and there is a window before it becomes a communications event, and either you sat in it or you went straight past it into the telling. And nobody has ever suggested to you that the window is not you being odd, and that it is in the Bible, and that there is Somebody in it with you.

The Psalm Does Both, And Does Them In Order

There is a psalm that swings between an entire nation shouting and one person talking about their own soul, and the hinge line is one of the most invitational sentences in Scripture.

"Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul."Psalm 66:16

Come and hear. That is a man inviting a crowd. He wants an audience and he says so, and the psalm around it is loud and corporate and full of everybody.

But read the second half of the line, because it names what he is about to tell them. What He hath done for my soul. My soul. Singular. Private. Something that happened in one person that the crowd was not present for.

He could not have said the second half if he had not had the first thing. There is a private knowing under a public telling, and the telling is only worth anything because the knowing happened.

You have a soul that something happened in, and it is yours before it is anybody's. Psalm 66 puts the private work under the public declaration without embarrassment about either, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a temple song and sits it on a low wall by some bike racks.

That is the grammar of the first through the whole of this subject. The first is not the biggest and it is not the loudest. It is what comes before the rest, so that everything after it follows something already named.

You were given a window and it is not a waste of time. That is what the written word does with gladness over and over, and it is the Spirit of God who makes eleven minutes on a wall land as something real rather than as a delay.

Nobody Is Telling You To Hold Back

Now the guard, and it matters, because articles like this can be read as an instruction to be private about your joy and that is not what is being said.

Tell everybody. Esperanza rang her father and screamed with Wren and read eleven one word messages from an aunt and every single bit of that was right and good and part of it.

There is no rule here about waiting. There is no minimum window. If you had shouted it in the corridor at eleven minutes past ten, nothing would have been lost and nobody would have marked you down.

What is on offer is smaller and better than a rule. It is that in the window, whether it is eleven minutes or four seconds, there is Somebody there, and He was glad about it before the noticeboard went up.

You are not alone in the gap between the news and the telling. It is written that He is a very present help, which is a statement about location and not about timing, and His Spirit is the one who was on that wall in the sun before anybody found her.

And say it as plainly as this site says everything. Nothing on this page asks you for anything. No window, no words, no ranking of who to tell, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work at all, this one included. If the whole corridor knows before God gets a word, you are exactly as much His by the water cooler, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming a technique.