The Smoking Flax

She has a small thing and she has decided it is too small.

Let me describe it exactly, because I think the exactness is the kindness here. What she has is not a burning conviction. It is not the sort of thing anybody would stand up and testify about. It is a faint and persistent wisp, and it does this: three or four times a week, usually at an unremarkable moment, she becomes aware that she does not want to be the way she has been about a particular thing.

That is all. No tears. No collapse. A quiet turning of the head, four times a week, for about a year.

And she has weighed that against what she thinks the real thing looks like, and she has found it wanting.

She has a picture of what proper repentance is, and the picture came from somewhere, probably from an account she heard once told with great feeling. In the picture there is weeping and a definite hour and a person who is unmistakably changed by the following week. Against that, a faint wisp four times a week is not even in the same category. It seems almost insulting to call it by the same name.

So she has not called it anything. She has let it come and go for a year, unnamed and uncounted, and she has waited for the real thing to arrive.

And I want to hold this quietly for a moment rather than rushing to fix it, because the waiting is not silly and she is not being precious. She wants it to be real. That is the whole motive. She would rather have nothing than have something she cannot trust.

That is you with your wisp.

You have a faint thing that keeps returning and you have not let yourself count it, because you have a picture of the real thing and yours does not look like the picture.

The one promise made specifically to the barely alight

Isaiah is describing the Servant, and he says four things about how He will handle people. Two of them are about the weakest possible cases, and they are put deliberately at the front.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.Isaiah 42:3

Take the second image, because it is yours. The smoking flax. Flax is the fiber in a lamp wick, and a smoking wick is one that has gone out and is producing nothing but a thread of smoke. It is not a lamp. Nobody could read by it. In any practical sense it has failed.

And the ordinary thing to do with a wick like that is pinch it. Not out of cruelty. Because it is done, and it is smoking the room out, and a sensible person ends it.

The verse says He will not.

You are the smoking flax in that sentence, and the promise was made to you specifically rather than to the lamps, and I am not making this comfortable at the expense of the text: Isaiah 42:3 names the barely alight in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my gentleness who can bring it into a room where somebody has been waiting for a flame.

Sit with why the image was chosen. God could have said He will not put out a lamp. Everyone would have agreed and nobody would have been helped. He chose the one state where quenching would be entirely reasonable, and He made His promise there, at the very bottom, in the only place where a person could be certain the promise included them.

You have not been overlooked because you are faint, and faint is the condition the sentence was built around, which is written into the verse rather than being my sympathy for a quiet year, with the Spirit of God able to make it land where a picture of somebody else's experience has been standing for a year.

And notice what He does instead of quenching. The verse does not say He tolerates the smoking flax, or leaves it alone, or lowers His standards for it. It goes straight on: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth. He carries the whole thing through to a right conclusion. The faintness does not lower the outcome; it simply is not the factor deciding it.

I want to say one more thing, and I will say it slowly. The picture you have of proper repentance came from a real account and that account was probably true. But an account of one person's experience is not a specification. Some people weep. Some people notice a quiet turning of the head four times a week for a year, and the second one is not a lesser version of the first. It is a different person.

This counts, in the faint form it actually takes, and it has counted every one of those four times a week, because Scripture makes the promise to the smoking flax by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a room by a hearth.