The Testimony She Was Waiting to Earn

Fourth Sunday of the month is testimony night, and Yvonne has been in the same seat for it for four years. Fourth row, aisle side, close enough that standing up would be easy and far enough back that nobody looks at her when the pastor says, anybody got something.

In the side pocket of her purse there is an index card. It is soft at the corners now, the way paper gets when it has been carried a long time. There are two lines written on it in blue ink and a third line she started and stopped, and the stopping is the whole story.

She wrote it the first spring she got clean. She sat at her kitchen table with the window open and she wrote the first line, which was about the night it turned, and she wrote the second line, which was about the woman at the shelter who prayed with her at four in the morning and did not once make her feel like a project. Then she went to write the third line and she realized she did not have it yet. Her son was not home. The relationship with her daughter was two texts a month, and both of them were about scheduling. Fourteen months, at that point. Not ten years. Fourteen months.

So she decided to wait. That is how she would put it, and she would put it cheerfully. I am waiting until there is more to say. And every fourth Sunday she has sat in the fourth row, aisle side, with a soft-cornered index card in her purse, listening to other people tell theirs, and she has been genuinely and completely glad for every one of them. She cries at the good ones. She is the first one on her feet when a young man finishes.

But the card stays in the purse, because the card is not finished, and somewhere along the line Yvonne stopped believing that the card was the thing that was unfinished. She started to believe it was her. She would never say that out loud. It comes out sideways, in the way she talks about herself in the third person when she is tired, and in the way she volunteers for setup so that she has somewhere to be that is not the microphone.

She is not waiting for a testimony. She is waiting to be worth telling one.

Now put the card down for a second, because I am talking to you, and I know that you have one too. Yours might be a marriage that is still difficult, a diagnosis that is still a diagnosis, a child who is still not calling, a habit at fourteen months and not ten years. You have decided, quietly and without telling a soul, that the claim of God on your life is provisional until the ending improves. So let me be the one to say the thing nobody has said to you in four years of fourth Sundays. You are loved first and the loving did not wait for the third line. Titus 2:11 says the grace of God has appeared, past tense, already, finished, and the Holy Spirit did not walk you into this room tonight so you could watch it happen to other people.

Grace already appeared, and it did not check the ending

Paul is writing to a young pastor on an island full of hard cases, giving him instructions for old men, young men, older women, younger women, workers. Then he stops the instructions cold and tells him why any of it is possible at all.

For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men.Titus 2:11

Hath appeared. Not is going to appear when the numbers improve. Not appears to the ones whose stories came out clean. It appeared, the way a light appears in a room, and the appearing is a completed event that happened outside you and before you and without consulting you at all.

Sit in that word for a moment, because your whole four years are built on the opposite of it. You have been living as though grace were a reward waiting at the end of a story, so the only sensible thing to do is finish the story first. But grace is not at the end. Grace is what showed up at the beginning and is the reason there is a story at all. You have grace that has already appeared over your life, and it appeared before you had anything to report. His word settled it in Titus 2:11, and His Spirit is what makes you hear that as your own and not as somebody else's testimony night.

Watch how Paul says it in another letter. God commends His love toward us in that while we were still without strength, Christ died for us. Not when we recovered our strength. While we had none. You were loved at your worst hour with the same love you are loved with now, and none of it was rated. That is the plain reading of Romans 5:8, and the Spirit will not let you renegotiate it into something you have to catch up to.

What is settled, and what is still moving

Now I have to be careful with you, because there is a way to hear all of this that would do you harm, and I am not going to hand you that.

I am not telling you that the ending does not matter. It matters. Your son coming home matters. Two texts a month becoming a phone call matters. Fourteen months becoming four years matters and God is genuinely in every one of those, and the work He is doing in you is real and it is not decoration. Nobody here is asking you to stop wanting a better ending or to pretend that the wanting is unspiritual. Keep wanting it. Keep doing every honest thing your hands find to do about it, and keep the help you have been given.

The distinction is this, and once you have it you will never confuse the two again. The claim on you is settled and your story is still moving, and those are two different sentences that were never in competition. Scripture put it beyond argument in Ephesians 2:8, that you are saved by grace through faith and not of yourselves, and the Spirit keeps saying that in the pauses while you are waiting for something to change.

The claim was made first. Before the kitchen table. Before the shelter at four in the morning. Before the first line of blue ink. Nothing about you qualified you for it, which means nothing about your progress is holding it up. You are His today, at the exact stage you are actually at, with the card exactly as unfinished as it is. You have that on the authority of 2 Corinthians 12:9, where He says His grace is sufficient and His strength is made perfect in weakness, and the Spirit is not offering you a revised edition of that verse with conditions in the margin.