The Wanting She Keeps Under Her Breath

There is nobody in the house.

That is the thing she cannot get past. There is nobody in the house. It is a Tuesday morning, the radio is on low, she is waiting for the kettle, and she said it under her breath.

Come, Lord.

Two words, said at about the volume you use for a shopping list you are checking against the cupboard.

And then she stood there with the cup in her hand, and thought, who exactly was I hiding that from.

She has been doing it for eleven years. She knows because she can date the start of it precisely.

She said it big once. In a room, standing up, in front of people who knew her, and she was not being dramatic, she was being honest at a volume that matched how much she meant it. And a season went by, and things did not go the way she had said out loud that she believed they would go, and nobody in that room was ever unkind to her about it, not once, not one of them.

And her voice went down anyway.

It did not go down all at once. It went down the way a radio goes down when somebody keeps turning it a little quieter every time they pass, until one day you realize you have been reading lips for a month.

Now the wanting lives under her breath. In the car. At the sink. In an empty house on a Tuesday.

And here is what she will not say to anybody, because it sounds like nothing when you write it down. She still wants it more than she wants almost anything. That never changed. Not one degree of it changed. The only thing that changed is the volume.

If there is something you only say when nobody can hear you, come and walk down the market with me a minute. It is loud enough down here that nobody will notice.

The verse that names a whole crowd

There is a line written by a man at the very end of his life, in a cell, with nothing at all going the way anybody would have planned.

Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.2 Timothy 4:8

Read the last clause slowly. All them also that love his appearing.

That is the description. Not all them that predicted it. Not all them that got the season right. All them that love it, which is a word about wanting, and wanting is the thing you have been doing under your breath for eleven years. And notice it is a crowd. Not to me only, he says. There is a company of them, and the qualification for membership is the exact thing you have been treating as a private embarrassment.

You are named in that verse already, and the naming is done by what you love rather than by what you called correctly. 2 Timothy 4:8 makes loving His appearing the description of the whole company, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that phrasing through a letter written from a prison cell with nothing scheduled, which means eleven years of whispering has been eleven years of belonging.

The volume was never the thing that failed

Let us go carefully here, because there are two separate things and they got fused in one room a long time ago.

There was what you wanted. And there was the volume you said it at.

Neither of those is what came apart. What came apart was a season, and a season was never yours to issue in the first place.

You have a longing that is entirely sound and a timetable that was never handed to you. Scripture keeps the times and the seasons in the Father's own power in Acts 1:7 and makes no exception for the sincere, and it is the Spirit who stirs the wanting in a person without ever putting a date underneath it, so what stood up in that room was a woman who loved His appearing and the only wrong thing in the room was a calendar nobody had given her.

And then the volume came down, as though volume were the offense. It was never the offense. Nobody has ever been rebuked in the whole of Scripture for wanting Him too loudly.

Eleven years of turning it down

Now the whisper itself, because it has done something and it deserves to be looked at squarely.

A wanting kept under the breath for eleven years starts to feel like a wanting that ought to be kept under the breath. That is what habit does. The volume becomes a verdict, and then the verdict becomes obvious, and then it becomes just how you are.

You were never given a verdict, and the quiet you have been keeping was a habit rather than a sentence. Psalm 42:4 has a man remembering how he went with the multitude with the voice of joy and praise, and it is written by somebody in a low season looking back at his own volume, and it is the same Spirit who moves a person to lift their voice among a crowd who has been sitting in your kitchen on Tuesday mornings this whole time.