I Heard It Once and I Cannot Make It Stay

A man told me the best four days of his life happened about six years ago and that he has been trying to get back to them ever since.

He was at a thing. He does not tell it dramatically. He says something happened while somebody was praying and that for about four days he walked around knowing, in his body, that God loved him.

He said the word he uses is knowing and that this is imprecise and it is the best he can do.

And then it went. Not with a bang and not because of anything. It thinned out over about a week, and by the following Tuesday he was back to what he calls normal, which is believing it as a doctrine and not feeling it as a fact.

He has spent six years going to things. He has prayed the same prayer. He has changed a great deal about his life. He said what he cannot bear is the suspicion that it was a mood, and that he manufactured it, and that the whole of Christianity is a mood he cannot maintain.

There is a prayer in Ephesians that is aimed at exactly this and it asks for something very carefully worded.

Paul prays for a knowing that cannot be held by understanding

Here is the prayer.

And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. (Ephesians 3:19, King James Version)

Read the middle clause. Which passeth knowledge. He is asking people to know something that he says in the same sentence cannot be known.

That is not carelessness. It is exact. He is describing a knowing that is not the kind a person achieves by understanding, holding or remembering, because the thing being known exceeds the equipment.

Which is the answer to a man chasing four days. He is trying to get back to a state, and Paul is praying for something that was never located in a state in the first place.

And notice what the prayer asks for as the outcome: that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. Filling is something done to a container by somebody else. Nobody fills themselves.

You are asking for something nobody can hold by understanding it, and Paul knew that when he prayed it. Ephesians 3:19 asks to know a love which passeth knowledge, and it is the same Spirit, named two verses earlier as strengthening the inner man with might, who is the one doing the work that prayer describes.

The verse two lines up says how it is held

The mechanism is in the verses before it, and it is agricultural and architectural rather than emotional.

That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height. (Ephesians 3:17-18)

Rooted and grounded. Two pictures, and both are about something below the surface. Roots and foundations are the parts nobody sees and nobody feels, and they are what a thing stands on when the weather changes.

Nobody experiences their own foundations. A person notices them only when a storm arrives and the building does not move.

Which reframes the four days entirely. The four days were weather. The rooting is what was happening underneath, and it does not present itself as a feeling on a Tuesday, and its absence from a Tuesday is not evidence that it is not there.

You are rooted and grounded in something that does not present itself as weather. Ephesians 3:17 uses roots and foundations rather than experiences. It is the Spirit of God, Ephesians 3:16 strengthening in the inner man, who does the work below the surface that nobody feels while it happens.

What Paul lists, and what he leaves out

There is a list at the end of Romans 8 that is worth reading for what is not on it.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)

Ten items, and then a catch all. Death, life, angels, powers, the present, the future, height, depth, and any other created thing.

And not one of them is a feeling, a dry spell, or a Tuesday.

Paul was writing to people under real pressure and he listed the largest possible forces, and the whole rhetorical weight of the passage is that if those cannot do it, nothing smaller can either.

Any other creature covers the rest, and it covers the state of a man's chest at eleven in the morning six years after a good week.

You are not separated by anything on that list or by anything smaller. Romans 8:39 says nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God. It is His Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit in the same chapter, who does the reporting that a feeling was never assigned.

What the love is described as doing while nothing is felt

There is a line in Jeremiah where God tells people what He has been doing during a stretch when nothing was apparent.

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. (Jeremiah 31:3)

Therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. Drawing is a continuous action, and it is described as the thing that has been happening the whole time, including through the parts they would have described as nothing.

And Paul writes one line to Timothy that covers the worst version of this worry:

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself. (2 Timothy 2:13)

He cannot deny himself. The reliability is grounded in His own nature rather than in the state of the person believing, which is the only ground that holds on a Tuesday.

You have been drawn continuously, including through everything that felt like nothing. Jeremiah 31:3 says with lovingkindness have I drawn thee as an ongoing action, and it is the Holy Spirit, John 6:44 alongside the Father's drawing, who does the drawing a person cannot detect while it is happening.