Nell had imagined the letter for a long time before it came.
She had a picture of it, actually, the way you do. She would be standing at the front door with the envelope, and she would read the sentence that mattered, and something in her chest that had been shut since the spring would come open, and she would go and sit down and cry in a good way. She had rehearsed the crying.
The letter came on a Tuesday in October, between a catalogue and a card for a dentist appointment.
She read it standing up. She read it again. The sentence that mattered was in the third paragraph and it said what she had been saying for fourteen months, in the flat and careful language those letters are written in.
She put the kettle on.
That was the whole thing. That was the moment. She stood at the worktop with the letter in one hand while the kettle came up, and she waited for whatever was supposed to happen, and nothing happened at all. Not relief. Not a rush. Nothing came open. She felt exactly the way she had felt at nine that morning, which was tired, and slightly braced, and thinking about whether there was enough bread.
She put the letter in the second drawer of the dresser, under the spare keys and the tea towels nobody uses.
It is still there. That was ten months ago.
And here is what has actually changed about Nell in ten months. She still walks up from the car park the long way, past the garages, so she does not have to go by the window of the office. She still rehearses her side of it in the car, at the lights, sometimes out loud. She still cannot say the woman's name, not to her sister, not to God. She still wakes with a jolt about once a week for no reason she can find.
Nothing has moved. Nothing at all.
And somewhere in the last few months she has started to draw a conclusion from that, and the conclusion is the thing I want to get to, because it is much heavier than the letter ever was.
She has started to wonder whether the flatness means it did not take. Whether a woman who was genuinely innocent would feel something. Whether the fact that she is unchanged is itself a kind of finding, quietly returned, by a court she cannot appeal to.
You know that court. Everybody who has been through anything knows that court.
It might not be a letter for you. It might be the day the phone stopped ringing, or the meeting that ended it, or the moment somebody finally said out loud that it was not your fault. Something arrived that was supposed to change you. You are, as far as you can tell, precisely the same person you were the day before it arrived.
And you have started to read that as a verdict.
The work is not happening where the light is
Paul does not pray what you would expect a man to pray for people under pressure.
He does not pray that they would feel better. He does not pray for visible improvement, or for a change in their circumstances anybody could point at. He prays that God would grant them, out of the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in their hearts through faith. That is Ephesians 3:16 and 17, and it is a prayer aimed deliberately at the one part of a person nobody, including that person, gets to watch.
Read that as the answer to the flatness, because it is one.
You are being strengthened in a place that has no window in it. The Spirit is at work in the inner man according to what is written in Ephesians 3, which means the region where you have been looking for evidence is not the region where the work is being done. You have been checking the wrong ground for growth, and the checking is not a sin, it is just information you did not have.
Now look at the phrase Paul lands on, because it is the whole comfort of the thing.
Rooted and grounded in love. Not rooting yourself. Not working on your roots. Rooted, done to you, the way a tree does not achieve its own root system by concentrating. And the Spirit who is named in the verse right before it is the one doing it, in the dark, in the part of the ground that has never in the history of the world been the part anybody could see.
I want to say what this is not, because a careless version of it has probably been handed to you already.
Nobody is telling you a schedule. There is no season named here, no stage you are in that ends in the spring, no hint that fruit is due. Scripture sets no rate for this and neither will I, and the Spirit has never once asked a person to produce visible change on a timetable so that other people, or she herself, can be satisfied that something took.
And it is worth saying flatly. Feeling nothing when the letter came is not a finding.
It is a nervous system that spent fourteen months at full stretch and does not switch registers because a third paragraph says so. It is not evidence about your innocence, your faith or your heart. What is written says Christ dwells in your heart through faith, and the dwelling is a fact about who is in there rather than a report on how it felt on a Tuesday, and His Spirit is the one who makes that dwelling actual rather than theoretical.
that He may grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in loveEphesians 3:16 to 17
Here is the turn.
I have no standing to tell you that you have changed. I have not met you, I was not there in the spring, and a stranger telling you what is going on in your own chest is exactly the kind of thing that has already been done to you by too many people.
But Ephesians 3:17 has that standing, and His Spirit is the one making it land, and what it says is not about change at all. It says Christ dwells in your heart. Present tense. Dwelling, not visiting, not assessing, not waiting to see whether the improvement justifies the tenancy.
Which means the question you have been quietly asking has already been answered somewhere other than in your feelings.
You are not being marked. There is no court above the one that cleared you, quietly returning a second finding on the strength of how little you felt in October. God does not deal in that, nothing written anywhere in Scripture says He does, and the Spirit has never been the author of that second finding. He is not sitting in your kitchen with a clipboard measuring the distance between the letter and the woman holding it.
So put down the audit. Not the memory, and not the long way round from the car park, and not the jolt at four in the morning, because those are not yours to switch off by deciding to. Just the audit. Just the part where you use your own flatness as evidence against yourself.
Declare this over yourself
Say these with both feet pressed down. The standing to speak to a letter in a drawer is not confidence you are manufacturing in yourself: it is yours in Christ, delegated, exercised in His name and not in your own strength, and the Spirit who is prayed for in Ephesians 3:16 is the One who makes it land. Speak, keep your feet down, and leave the outcome with Him, however He answers and whatever this year shows or does not show.
- Letter in the second drawer, you are not my verdict and you were never my proof. You told the truth in October and I felt nothing at all, and the God who roots me does His work in ground I was never given a window into.
- The thought that the clearing did not take, get out of my chest. Christ is dwelling in my heart through faith and I am rooted and grounded in love, and Ephesians 3 says the Holy Spirit does that in the inner man where nobody gets to watch, including me. I am not the judge of my own soil.
- Father, You are strengthening me with power through the Spirit in the inner man, and I am pressing both feet into this floor while I say so. In the name of Jesus I put down the audit of my own chest. Whatever shows and whenever it shows, You have already rooted me in love, and the work is Yours.
Ephesians 3:17
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
