From the Inside It Is All Lead

Elliot has spent thirty-four years on the wrong side of the glass.

He restores windows. Old ones, mostly, in buildings that are cold in every month of the year, and the work is done from a scaffold on the inside, at night when there is nobody about, under two work lamps that flatten everything they touch.

And from the inside, at night, a stained glass window is not beautiful.

It is a grid of lead that has gone black. The glass is dull, because glass of that kind is made to be lit from the other side, and lit from this side it is closer to slate. You cannot see the picture. You cannot see the faces. There is a section he worked on for eleven weeks in a church in the north that he never once saw as anything other than a shape.

A lad on the scaffold asked him about it in his first month.

"How do you know what color that is?"

And Elliot said, "I do not. Not from here."

"So how do you match it?"

And Elliot said, "I go outside in the morning."

Now the reason I am telling you about Elliot is not the window.

Eleven years ago he began praying about his son. It does not matter what about. It went on a long time and it was the most sustained thing he has ever done in his life.

And it resolved.

That is the word he uses, carefully, because he will not say answered and he will not say unanswered. The boy is alive. The boy is safe. The situation Elliot was praying about does not exist any more.

And his son lives four hundred miles away and rings at Christmas and speaks to him for eleven minutes.

So Elliot has an answer he cannot call good.

He is too honest to say God did nothing. He can list what changed. And he is also too honest to stand in a room full of people and give thanks for it, because he would be performing, and he has watched other men perform and it turned his stomach.

He said one sentence about it to his brother in a car park two years ago.

He said, "I got what I asked for and I would not have chosen it."

And his brother said, "That is the strangest sentence I have ever heard you say."

And Elliot said, "I know. I have been trying to make it into a different one for nine years."

Partial is not a failure. It is the position.

Paul writes a line in the middle of the chapter everybody reads at weddings, and it is the least sentimental sentence in it.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.1 Corinthians 13:12

Now we see in a mirror dimly. The mirrors of that world were polished metal. Not a clear reflection: a shape, a suggestion, enough to work with and not enough to be sure of.

And notice he says we. Paul. Writing Scripture. Includes himself.

Now I know in part. Not: I know in part because I have not applied myself. Partial sight is described as the standing condition of every believer on this side, including apostles, and Paul does not treat it as a problem to be solved by better faith.

So hear this said over you, on the scaffold under the work lamps. You are seeing this in part because that is the position everybody is in, and your inability to call it good is not a failure of gratitude. That is written by the man who wrote most of the New Testament about himself, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as searching even the depths of God, which is a work going on far above what you can currently make out.

Now let me handle the thing you have been trying to do for nine years, because you have been trying to do an impossible job.

You have been trying to convert I would not have chosen this into this is good, by an effort of will, in your own head, at night, on the inside of the glass.

You cannot do it from there. Nobody can.

And here is the mercy in that: you are not required to. There is not a verse anywhere that asks you to certify an outcome as good before you are able to see it. What Scripture asks is that you trust the One who can see it, which is a completely different act and one you can actually perform tonight.

Elliot does not stand on the scaffold guessing at the color and calling it right. He does the work, in the dark, with a shape and not a picture, and he goes outside in the morning.

Now let me say what this message will not do.

It will not tell you why the answer came in this shape. Nothing here says God arranged eleven minutes at Christmas to teach you anything, and nothing here says a better prayer would have produced a better shape.

And it will not ask you to be glad yet.

That is the thing people keep asking of you and it is not in Paul. He does not say now I see in part and therefore I feel fine about it. He says now I see in part, and then face to face, and he leaves the gap open and honest, which is exactly where you have been standing for nine years without permission.

You have permission. From the inside it is all lead. That is not doubt. That is an accurate report from a man on a scaffold, and it is the only report available from there.

And the one thing that is true regardless of what you can see: God does His most decisive work in the place where nothing about Him is visible. A cross, in the dark, with a cry and no answer, and every observable fact saying He was not there and nothing was happening.

That was the hour the world was saved, and there was nothing to see.

There was a man five hundred years ago who said that God's work is always hidden under what looks like its opposite, and that faith is not the ability to see the picture but the willingness to keep working on the glass while it is still all lead. He said he had never once seen the outside of anything he had prayed about, and that he expected to, and not from a scaffold.