Eleven Years and He Still Says He Does Not Believe

He came to the carol service. He comes to the carol service every year, and he sings, and he is good with the people afterward, and somebody always says something nice to you about him.

On Sunday you asked him. Not a big conversation. Just a question in the car, framed lightly, the way you have learned to frame it over eleven years so that it does not become an event.

And he said, kindly, without any heat in it at all, that he really does not believe any of it, that he never has, and that he does not think he is going to, and that he does not mind you doing it and he is not going to pretend.

He is not a hard man. He is one of the two or three kindest men you have ever met. He drove your mother to every appointment for a year and a half and never once mentioned it.

Eleven years. Every night, after he is asleep, on your side of the bed, with the lamp still on. A blessing over him out loud. Not a prayer for his conversion; you stopped praying that way in about year four because of what it was doing to you. Just a blessing.

Four thousand nights, give or take.

And you turned the lamp off on Sunday and lay there in the dark, and something you have never let get all the way to the surface got all the way to the surface.

Eleven years, and he is exactly where he was.

You cannot tell whence it cometh

Sit on that side of the bed a while. There is nothing to sort out tonight and I am not going to hand you an approach.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit will not have me flattering a woman at four thousand nights: you have not been doing it wrong. Nothing in this article is going to suggest that a different wording, or more faith, or naming something more specific, or saying it while he is awake, would have changed him. Anybody who suggests that is guessing, and what they are really doing is making a grown man's soul into your deliverable, and God has never once done that.

And a second thing, which the whole of this site stands or falls on: a blessing is not a lever on another person's will. You are not permitted to use it that way, and I would not teach you to, and I do not believe you have been. What you have been doing on that side of the bed for eleven years is not an attempt to steer him. Do not let anybody turn it into one.

Now come and look at what Christ says about how this actually works, to a man who wanted a mechanism.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.John 3:8

Nicodemus has come at night with an intelligent question, and Jesus gives him an answer that refuses to be a method.

Look at the three things He says. It blows where it wants. You hear the sound of it. You cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.

That is a deliberate description of something real, powerful, audible in its effects, and entirely unavailable for inspection. It is not that nothing happens. It is that you do not get to watch it, and you certainly do not get to steer it.

Eleven years of words are inside a process Christ described as untraceable on purpose, and you were never issued a window into it. That is not me comforting a woman in the dark. That is what is written, and the answer He gave to a man who asked exactly your question, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on the edge of a bed with the lamp still on.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing somebody who does not believe. When you say those words over him, you are not working on him. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a man He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it, and He does not report on Sundays, and He has never once required your husband's agreement in order to come through.

A blessing is not an input, and a man's answer in a car is not its readout. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us (Deuteronomy 29:29), and the Spirit has never handed a wife a gauge. What was revealed to you is that you speak good over the man you married. That you have done, four thousand times, in the dark, at no cost to him and with no credit to you.

What got to the surface on Sunday

Now let me name it, because it came up in the dark and things that come up in the dark should be said in daylight.

Eleven years, and he is exactly where he was. That sentence is not unbelief and it is not disloyalty. It is arithmetic arriving in a bedroom. Four thousand nights, one visible position, and a mind that has been counting without being asked produces a ratio, and a ratio produces a verdict on the whole enterprise.

And a verdict like that does not usually make a woman stop loving her husband. It makes her stop saying it. Quietly, one Tuesday, with no announcement, and eleven years of faithfulness ends without a decision being made.

That is not weakness and I will not call it that. It is what happens when love and a measurable position share a bed for eleven years. And what is written never once invited you to compute it, and the Spirit is not lying awake beside you with the figures.

God did not ask you to convert your husband, and He has never once made another adult's faith the grade on a wife's obedience. It is written that so then every one of us shall give account of himself to God (Romans 14:12), himself, which is God assigning each person their own file and no one else's, and the same Spirit who breathed it is in this room at eleven at night, which is why it reads as a ruling and not as a comfort.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you he will come to faith if you keep going, and I am not telling you he will not. I have no authority to promise you a man's soul as a return on eleven years, and anybody who does is selling you something and using your husband as the currency. What God does in him is His, entirely.

What I can put in your hands is this: four thousand blessings have not come back to God empty, and their worth was never resting on what he says in a car. God's word does not come back to Him void (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a woman who has spoken good over a kind man for eleven years with nothing to show has done something heaven wrote down.