Nineteen at the Lake

He can tell you the week. Second week of July, the summer he was nineteen, at a lake in the northern part of the state that he has not been back to.

He can tell you where he was standing. He can tell you that it was after ten at night and that there were still people down at the water and he had walked up the hill on his own, and that what happened up there was not dramatic and did not involve anybody else and lasted maybe forty minutes.

He has never described it well. The best he has managed, on the two occasions he tried, is that something came into him and he knew what it was and he was not frightened.

He is fifty one now.

And here is the shape his life has taken around that week, which he has never examined because you do not examine the thing you are standing on.

That week is the deposit. Everything since has been a slow draw against it. There have been good years, and one very hard year, and a stretch in his forties that he does not talk about much, and through all of it the lake has functioned as the balance, the thing he could point to when somebody asked whether he had ever actually experienced anything.

The trouble is arithmetical and he has been avoiding it for a while. A balance that gets drawn against and never added to eventually gets low, and he is at the point where he can feel exactly how low.

What he will not do, and could not tell you why, is ask again. There is something in him that treats asking again as a kind of insult to the lake.

The sentence, if he ever said it, would come out like this: I already had my turn.

You may have your own lake. The one deposit, and a balance you would rather not look at.

The same people, filled again

Here is the thing about the book of Acts that nobody points out to a man in his position, and it will take about four seconds to see and a while longer to believe.

The people who were filled at Pentecost get filled again. In the same book. Repeatedly, and without anybody treating it as a correction.

Chapter two is the famous one. By chapter four the same crowd is in a room and the place shakes and they are all filled again, and Luke reports it the way you would report the tide coming in. And then, eight chapters after that, in a town where the whole thing has just gone badly wrong for the missionaries, you get this.

And the disciples were filled with joy, and with the Holy Ghost.Acts 13:52

That is not the first filling of those people. That is an ordinary week somewhere in the middle of the story, in a town where the leaders had just run Paul out, and the people left behind are described as being filled.

You are looking at a pattern and not a single event, and Acts 13:52 has believers filled well after the beginning of the book with no suggestion that a first filling had failed, and it is His Spirit who takes a line about a town in Asia Minor and lands it on a man who has been living on a lake for thirty two years.

A deposit is the wrong picture

Consider what he has actually been assuming, because the assumption is the whole problem and it is invisible to him.

He thinks of that week as capital. Something given once, in a lump, to be spent carefully over a lifetime. That is a coherent model. It is also nowhere in the book, and it produces exactly the anxiety he has, because every capital account has a floor.

The picture Luke keeps using is not capital. It is closer to tide, or weather, or breathing. Something that happens, and then happens again, and the happening again is not remedial.

You have been keeping accounts on something that was never issued as a lump, because the written word describes the same people filled at chapter two and chapter four and chapter thirteen without one word of rebuke in between, and His Spirit is what turns that from an observation about Acts into a permission a man can use tonight.

And notice what sits next to the filling in that verse. Joy. Not power, not a sign, not anything he would have to perform. Joy, in a town where the mission had just been thrown out, which tells you what that filling was for and what condition the people were in when it came.

You are the sort of person that verse is about, and Acts 13 fills people in the middle of a setback rather than at the height of anything, and the same Spirit who did that in a hostile town does it in an ordinary living room.

Asking again is not an insult to the lake

Now the thing that has actually stopped him, which is loyalty. He would not use that word but that is what it is.

He has a sense that going back and asking for more would somehow say the first time had not been enough, and he is not willing to say that about the best forty minutes of his life. That is a decent instinct pointed in the wrong direction.

Nobody in Acts ever apologizes for being filled twice. There is no scene where somebody hesitates because it might reflect badly on chapter two. The repetition is not embarrassing to anybody in the book, and it is certainly not embarrassing to God, who is the one doing it.

You were never going to offend Him by coming back, because Acts 13:52 records a further filling with no apology attached anywhere in the text, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that a door rather than a piece of information.