Intimacy With the Spirit

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Student: Professor, I want to talk about something I don't fully know how to explain. My relationship with the Holy Spirit.

Professor: Then explain what you can, and let the rest stay unspoken. Not everything sacred needs translation.

Student: That's part of what I mean. There are things between us I won't put into words, even here. Private things. Ways He speaks to me that feel too personal to hand to anyone else, even someone I trust.

Professor: Good. Keep them. A soul that tells everything has usually stopped treasuring anything. Some rooms in a friendship are meant to stay closed to visitors, even welcome ones.

Student: What I can say is this. Sometimes I pinch myself, almost like I forget it's real. I doubt in the middle of it, even while it's happening. And I hate that. It feels like a betrayal of something so good.

Professor: I don't think it is betrayal. I think it is simply what it costs to love something your eyes cannot confirm. Tell me, when the doubt comes, does it come because the presence has grown faint, or because the presence has grown so constant that your mind searches for a trick behind it?

Student: The second one, honestly. It's so good that some part of me assumes I must be inventing it.

Professor: There is your answer, then. The doubt is not evidence against Him. It is evidence of how unused your heart still is to being loved that completely. Suspicion is often just wonder that hasn't caught up with itself yet.

Student: When it's working, though, when we're in step, I can't compare it to anything. Not to any friendship, not to any love I've known from a person. It's honest in a way nothing else has ever been.

Professor: May I tell you something I have come to understand slowly, across a great many years?

Student: Please.

Professor: I once assumed nearness to Him would feel like achievement. That the closer I drew, the more I would sense my own progress, as though intimacy were a reward for effort. I was wrong. The nearest seasons of my life have felt the least like accomplishment and the most like being carried. He does the drawing near. I only stop resisting it.

Student: Does it keep growing? The closeness? Some days I feel like I fall further into it than the day before, and I wonder how that's even possible when it already felt complete.

Professor: It is possible because He is not a fixed quantity to be reached and then held. He is inexhaustible. You are not filling a cup that eventually tops off. You are wading into an ocean that has no far shore. Every day you go a little deeper, and every day there remains infinitely more depth ahead of you. That is not frustration. That is the shape of forever.

Student: Three persons in one. I try to understand Him and I keep running into mystery. It almost frustrates me, and then a moment later the mystery itself becomes the thing I love most.

Professor: That frustration turning to affection, hold onto that. It means you have stopped trying to master Him and started trusting Him. A God fully explainable would be a God small enough to finish learning, and what use would that be to a soul like yours? The mystery is not a locked door meant to keep you out. It is simply proof that you are dealing with something larger than your own mind, which is exactly what you would hope for in the One you have given your whole self to.

Student: He gives me a safety no person has ever given me. Sometimes I wish I had known Him sooner. I think of the years before, and I feel a kind of grief for how much peace I missed.

Professor: I understand that grief. I have felt it myself, looking back at years spent searching in rooms He was not standing in. But let me offer you this instead of regret. The years before were not wasted, they were simply the road that made this present nearness so unmistakable to you now. A man raised in constant daylight rarely marvels at the sun. It is often the ones who have known real darkness who recognize the dawn for the miracle it actually is. Your earlier years did not delay your peace. They are the reason you will never again mistake it for something ordinary.

Student: So the sooner I wish for isn't lost. It's just part of how I got here.

Professor: Precisely. And here is the last thing I will leave you with tonight, since you have already given me the better half of this conversation. The relationship you are describing, so honest, so personal, so beyond comparison to anything human, that is not a special case reserved for a rare few. It is what He is offering to every soul who will stop long enough to receive it. You have simply said yes to what was always being held out. Do not stop saying yes. That single answer, given again and again, is the whole of what you're calling closeness.

[The professor set down his cup and looked toward the window, where the dark had settled fully now.]

Professor: Keep your private rooms with Him, child. Some things were never meant to be explained to me, only lived by you. That you have them at all tells me everything I need to know about where you stand.

This is one piece of the archive, find the rest of the Student and Professor conversations over on TikTok.