She can hold two things at once and she has decided that this disqualifies her.
Here is how it goes on a Tuesday. She is at the sink, and she means every bit of the thing she is saying to God, and it comes up out of her genuinely, and then, in the same half second, another part of her says and you have said that before.
Both of those are her. That is the thing she cannot get past. It is not that a real voice is being interrupted by a fake one. They are both her, and they arrive together, and they have arrived together for as long as she can remember.
So she has concluded, over about three years, that she is a divided woman, and that God receives whole ones.
Nobody taught her that in a sentence. It is the kind of thing that assembles itself out of a hundred songs and testimonies where people sound entirely sure. She has heard a great many people be entirely sure. She has never once been entirely sure of anything in her life, including things she was right about, and she has taken that as a permanent defect rather than as a description of what being a person is like.
And so a woman who is genuinely turning cannot bring the turn, because it arrives with a heckler attached, and she believes the heckler has to be removed before the offering is acceptable.
Three years of trying to get rid of half of herself before she comes.
That is you at the sink.
You have two things in you at once and you have decided one of them makes the other one void. And you have been waiting to arrive undivided, and it has not happened, and it is not going to, because nobody has ever arrived that way anywhere.
The father said both halves out loud and Jesus took it
There is a father in Mark with a desperate situation and Jesus says a word to him about believing, and here is his reply. It is one sentence and it contradicts itself, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to preserve it exactly.
Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.Mark 9:24
Read that as a piece of grammar. In one breath the man says he believes, and in the same breath he admits he does not. If you handed that sentence to an examiner they would fail it. It cannot both be true.
And it is the sentence that gets the answer.
Jesus does not stop him and ask which one he means. He does not send him away to sort himself out and come back when the two halves have been reconciled. He does not treat the second half as canceling the first. The account moves straight on to what Jesus did next, and the man's divided sentence stands in Scripture forever as the words of somebody who got what he came for.
You are able to bring a sentence that contradicts itself, and it will not be sent back for correction, and I am not lowering the standard: Mark 9:24 is preserved in writing exactly as he said it, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can make that safe for a woman at a sink.
Now let me say something about the second half, because it is doing something clever that most people miss. Help thou mine unbelief. He does not promise to fix it. He does not undertake to work on it. He hands it over as one more thing he needs help with, which means he has put his unbelief into the same pile as the problem he came about.
That is the move. Not eliminating the doubting half. Bringing it.
You have a heckler that can be brought rather than removed, and bringing it is what the man in the account actually did, which is written into the second clause rather than being my kindness to you, with the Spirit of God able to reach three years of trying to arrive whole.
Here is what I will say from my own tradition, and I say it with love. We are loud people, and when we testify we sound sure, and I would not change that for anything, because certainty spoken out loud is a real gift to a room. But I have sat with enough of the people who sounded surest to tell you that almost every one of them has a Tuesday. The sound in a room is not a report on the interior of the people making it.
This is received divided, in the exact state your kitchen finds you in, because Scripture kept the contradiction on the page, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that in rather than leaving it as a story about somebody else's son.
Bring both halves.
The man in Mark did, in one sentence, without resolving the contradiction, and the sentence is preserved exactly as he said it because somebody wanted you to see that this is admissible. It was not corrected. It was answered.
You have been trying to remove half of yourself as a condition of entry, and there is no account anywhere in Scripture of anybody managing that, and several accounts of people who did not manage it and were received anyway.
You are received divided, and the doubting half comes in with you rather than having to be left at the door, because Mark 9:24 is one sentence with both in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a doorway rather than a nice detail.
Say it at the sink, both halves, in the order they come.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud, in whatever voice today has left you, and a divided one is welcome. The standing to say them is not something you work up to and it is not on loan from a sure week: Christ is in you, and the authority in these words belongs to Him and has been given to you in Scripture, made living by the Holy Spirit rather than by how single minded you feel. Jesus put the faith required at a mustard seed, which is His way of setting it under the line where anybody would trouble to measure, and then He said the part that carries: speak to the mountain. The mountain here is not the thing itself. It is the demand that you arrive whole. Speak to that. What He does with the rest of it He does in His own way, and the opening of the hands is yours to do today.
- Half of me I keep waiting to lose, you are not the entrance fee, and in the name of Jesus I bring the whole thing. Scripture keeps one man's contradiction on the page exactly as he said it, and that sentence is the one that got answered.
- Fear that a divided woman cannot be received, you have had three years of my Tuesdays and you are finished. Scripture has him hand his unbelief over as one more thing needing help, so the doubting half was brought in and never left at the door.
- Lord God, You took a sentence that argued with itself and You answered it without correcting a word, and I am sitting here with both hands open and both halves of me present. I thank You, because Your Holy Spirit did the drawing and Your word preserved the contradiction, and I am received whole in the sense that matters and not at the end of becoming somebody undivided.
Mark 9:24
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