A Quiz At One In The Morning

One in the morning and the only light in the room is the one in her hand.

She is sitting up in bed with her back against the wall because the headboard is uncomfortable and always has been. There is a glass of water on the nightstand that she poured at eleven and has not touched. The house is silent in the way a house is silent when everybody else in it made better decisions about bedtime.

And she has just finished a free spiritual gifts assessment on her phone.

Twenty questions. A little progress bar. A results page at the end with a color coded chart and a share button, which she is not going to use, obviously, because she would rather die.

This is the second one this year. She knows that. She did the other one in March and got something different, and she remembers thinking at the time that the March one was probably better designed.

The result is on the screen and she has read it four times. She does not believe it. She is also not able to put the phone down, and she is aware of both of those things at once, which is the specific misery of one in the morning.

And underneath it, the thing she went looking for at midnight that she would not describe this way to anyone: she was not trying to find out what her gift is.

She was trying to find out whether there is anything in her at all.

What this is not going to do

Right up front, because it is late and you deserve to know where this is going.

This page is not going to give you a better result. Not a more scientific one, not a more spiritual one, not one written by somebody who actually knows what they are talking about. I am not going to describe you closely enough that you can take it as a diagnosis, and there is no list at the bottom for you to find yourself on.

And nobody here is going to make you feel stupid for taking it. It was one in the morning, it was free, and you were looking for something real. That is not a character flaw. That is a person looking for something real.

You are not going to be told what you are on this page, and you have not failed to find it by looking in the wrong places. That is not me being nice at one in the morning. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman scored before He would deal with her.

The knowing is older than you

Here is the sentence, and it is said to a young man who had just told God he was too young and did not know how to speak.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.Jeremiah 1:5

Read the order of it, because the order is everything.

Before I formed thee. So the knowing comes before the forming. God did not make a person and then get to know her. The knowing is upstream of the making.

Which means there is no possible arrangement of your life, no result and no failure and no midnight, that could constitute new information. There is nothing about you He learned later.

You were known before you were formed, which puts the knowing about you further back than anything you could have done to change it. I am not stretching that verse. Jeremiah 1:5 puts knew before formed in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and makes it land on a woman sitting up in bed with a phone in her hand.

Twenty questions can only know what you told it

Now the plain mechanical thing, and it will help you more than it sounds like it will.

A quiz can hold exactly what you put into it. Twenty questions, twenty answers, and a result generated from those answers by a rule somebody wrote.

Which means at one in the morning, tired, and quietly hoping, you were the source of every single input. The screen gave you back a rearrangement of your own self-report.

That is not a scandal. That is arithmetic. And it explains why the March one was different, and why neither of them landed, and why you read this one four times looking for something that was never going to be in there.

You cannot find out whether there is anything in you from a machine that only knows what you already believed about yourself at midnight.

You have never once been reduced to what you were able to report about yourself at one in the morning, and the knowing that matters was never gathered from your answers. The word says He knew before He formed, and the Spirit who searches all things is not working from twenty inputs and a rule.

What you were actually asking

So let me say the thing, gently, because it is late and you already know it.

The question underneath was not which gift. It was: is there anything in me.

That is a much older question and it does not usually get asked out loud, and it almost never gets asked in daylight. It comes at one in the morning, on a phone, dressed up as something more respectable.

And here is what I can tell you and what I cannot.

I cannot tell you what is in you. Nobody can, and the ones who offer to are guessing and calling it discernment.

What Scripture says is that the question of whether there is anything in you was settled by God before you were formed, and that He sanctified before you had done one single thing, good or otherwise.

You are known, and you were set apart before you had a track record to be judged on, and there is nothing you could produce tonight that would improve that or lose it. That is Jeremiah 1:5 in its own order, and the Spirit who was given to you is not out there waiting for your results to come in.