Did I Imagine It

Aoife's question is not whether people believed her. It is whether there was anything there in the first place.

That is a different question and it is much worse, and she has never said it to anybody in those words because saying it would sound like she was fishing.

Here is the shape of it. She sees things. Or she has an impression, or a knowing, or whatever word you want, and the words are part of the problem because none of them is quite honest. It is not a voice. It is not a picture. It is closer to noticing, the way you notice that somebody in a room is upset before anybody has said anything, except about situations rather than people, and further out.

When she says one and nothing happens, the question arrives. It arrives within about a day.

Did I make that up?

And she cannot settle it. That is the thing. There is no test available. If the thing comes to pass she cannot rule out coincidence, and she is honest enough to know that a person who wants to be right will find confirmation in almost anything. If it does not come to pass she cannot rule out that it was real and conditional or that she got the timing wrong, which is the reasoning of somebody protecting a belief and she knows that too.

So she is stuck with an unfalsifiable thing in the middle of her life, and she is a careful person, and careful people find that unbearable.

And after twenty years the question has stopped being occasional. It now arrives with the sight. They come as a pair.

You have your own version. There is something you see, and there is a shadow attached to it, and the shadow has been there so long that you cannot remember what the sight felt like on its own.

Nobody here is going to settle it for you. I cannot, and anybody who offers to from a distance is doing something dishonest.

But there is a verse that puts partial knowing at the center of the whole business rather than at the edge of it, and it changes what the shadow is.

The word for it is in part, and Paul uses it about himself

There is a sentence in the middle of the most quoted chapter in the New Testament that people read past on the way to the poetry.

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.1 Corinthians 13:9

We prophesy in part.

That is not a warning about false prophets. It is not addressed to people getting it wrong. It is a description of the ordinary operating condition of the genuine article, written by a man who had more of it than anybody reading this and who included himself in the we.

In part. Partial. Fragmentary. Not the whole thing, never the whole thing, not for him either.

And the verse after it says that when the complete comes, the partial is done away, which locates the completeness somewhere other than here, and takes the pressure off every person currently trying to achieve it.

And your partial sight is not a defective version of somebody else's whole one. That is not my comfort: the written word puts in part into the definition rather than into the exceptions, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has spent twenty years assuming that the fragmentariness was evidence against her.

And the shadow is not proof of anything. The word says we see through a glass darkly, and darkly is the standard condition rather than a failure of the seer, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a lowering of expectation.

What the shadow actually is

Here is the part that took Aoife twenty years and one conversation with a doctor about something else entirely.

The question is not doubt. She has assumed for two decades that it was doubt, and treated it as a spiritual problem, and prayed about it as one.

It is a demand for a certainty that this particular gift does not produce and was never designed to produce.

That is why it is unfalsifiable. Not because she is deceived, and not because there is nothing there, but because she has been applying a test that belongs to a different kind of knowledge entirely. You can settle whether a bridge will hold. You cannot settle, by the same means, whether an impression about a situation was from God, and there has never been a period of history in which anybody could.

Which means twenty years of trying was never going to work, and the failure was in the instrument and not in her.

And you are not required to be certain in order to be faithful. The word says it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful, and faithfulness is the whole standard in that sentence with nothing about certainty in it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a place to stand for somebody who has been trying to prove something to themselves since their twenties.

And you have not been deceiving anybody. The word says the Lord looketh on the heart, and He is the one doing that looking rather than you auditing your own, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are, which is the only verdict in this that was ever going to be available.

What to do with a question that stays open

I am not going to tell you the question will go. It might not. Aoife's has not.

What changed for her is that it stopped being a wound and became a feature, and the difference is entirely in what she does when it arrives.

She used to try to answer it. Every time. Which meant every sight was followed by an internal trial, and the trial had no verdict, so it ran until she was tired and then adjourned until next time.

Now she writes the thing down, dates it, and does not answer the question.

Not because she has settled it. Because it is not hers to settle, and the dating is what says so. A dated page does not claim anything. It does not say this is from God and it does not say this is my imagination. It says: on this day, I saw this. That is a true sentence in either case, and it is the only true sentence available, and it can be written without resolving a thing.

And you are allowed to hold it open. Not once it resolves: the word says perfect love casteth out fear, and the Holy Spirit is entirely able to make an unresolved question a place a person can live rather than a room they are trapped in.