I Told One Person And The Sky Held

Nobody has ever told you what the ten minutes after are like.

That is what has been missing. Everybody says tell somebody. Nobody describes the actual experience of the interval between pressing send and getting a reply, and because nobody has described it, your imagination has filled it in, and imagination fills in with the worst available material.

So let me describe it, plainly, because I have sat with a great many people on both sides of it.

You press send. There is a drop, a physical one, in the chest and the stomach, and it is not pleasant. It lasts about forty seconds.

Then there is a stretch of waiting, and it is bad, and the worst thing about it is that it is boring as well as frightening. Your mind will produce three or four scenarios. You will consider unsending it. Do not, but you will consider it.

Then the reply comes. Almost always within an hour. And in almost every case it is shorter and kinder and duller than anything your mind produced, and the whole thing is over.

That is the ten minutes. It is not nothing. It is also not what you have been picturing for a year.

When thou passest through the waters

There is a verse in Isaiah about going through something rather than being spared it.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned. (Isaiah 43:2, King James Version)

When. Not if.

And through, all three times. Through the waters. Through the rivers. Through the fire.

There is no version in that verse where the person goes around. The waters are crossed and the fire is walked into, and the promise is not about avoidance, it is about what happens to them inside it.

You are walking through something tonight rather than around it, and no interval like this has ever once been longer than ten minutes. The Holy Spirit is the one who is inside the water rather than waiting on the far bank, and Isaiah 43:2 says when and through and never once says instead.

So the ten minutes are the waters. They are not skippable. There is no message you could write that would not have a drop in it, and no way of telling somebody that arrives without an interval.

What the verse says is that the interval does not overflow you.

You are not going to be overwhelmed by ten minutes, and Isaiah 43:2 has never once promised that a person will not have to walk through anything. It is written as when and through, twice over, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is inside an interval rather than waiting on the other side of it.

You have been trying to find a way round something that only has a way through. The word puts Him with a person in the water, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the forty seconds after a message goes.

What is actually on the other side

Now let me tell you what people report afterward, because this is the part that never gets said and it is the reason to do it at all.

Almost nobody says the reply was wonderful. That is not what people describe.

What they describe is that something they were carrying alone became something two people knew, and that the change was in them rather than in the situation. The house is identical, and a house is a record of what a hard stretch cost rather than a verdict on the person in it. The reply was probably four words. And something is different in a way they cannot explain to anybody who has not done it.

And the second thing they describe, very often, is that they slept better that night. Not for a week. That night. I have heard that so many times I have stopped being surprised by it.

You were never going to get a perfect answer, and there has never once been a version of this where the reply was the point. Isaiah 43:2 promises company in the water rather than a good outcome on the bank, and the Spirit of God is the one who changes something in a person while the situation stays exactly the same.

So tonight is the sentence and the ten minutes, and nothing else is promised.

You are permitted to walk into the worst ten minutes of your week tonight, and it has never once been longer than that. It is written that the rivers shall not overflow thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody in the interval.

Text one person

So here is the whole of it.

Pick one person. Send: the house is bad and I am working on it.

Then put the phone face down and go and do something with your hands for ten minutes. Wash something. Walk to the end of the road. That is not avoidance, it is how a person gets through an interval, and it works.

Then look.

You are able to walk through ten minutes tonight, and walking through them has never once required you to know what is on the other side. Isaiah 43:2 puts Him in the water with a person, and the Spirit of God is present in the interval and not only in the reply.