Chairs Still Out From The Last Time

Nobody moved the chairs.

That is the thing that stops her in the doorway with a bin bag in one hand, because she came in here to get the spare bulbs and she was not braced for it. Eleven chairs, still in the circle, still with the two slightly outside it where Denise and her brother always sat because Denise liked to be able to get up quickly.

There is a cup on the windowsill. Somebody's. Nine months.

She opened this room on a Thursday four years ago because there was nowhere in that whole building where a person could just come and pray with somebody else present and nobody talking at them. Eleven people at the best of it. Some weeks three. Once, memorably, one woman who did not speak for the entire hour and then said thank you at the door and left.

Then the rota changed at work. Not her doing, not anybody's fault, a national thing about staffing that came down from a long way above her, and Thursdays became the one evening she was never free.

She told everybody it would restart when the rota settled. The rota did settle. It settled into something worse.

And the sentence that has lived in her ever since, and that arrives full force in that doorway, is not I miss it. It is: I let it drop, and everybody who needed it just went back to having nowhere.

You know that sentence. It might be a group, or a habit of prayer, or a person you were checking on. Something you were holding got put down, for reasons you would defend in anybody else, and you have been carrying it as a moral failure ever since.

The keeping was never in your hands

Let me put the right verse in that doorway before anything else, because the wrong one has been in there for nine months.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.Jude 24

That is the last word of a very short letter, and it comes at the end of a page about people falling away, which is exactly what you think happened here. And what the letter does at the end is turn around and name the only One in the entire situation who is able to keep anybody: not the leader, not the faithful, not the woman who opened the room. Him.

You are being kept by a God whose keeping does not depend on a rota, and He has been doing it every Thursday of the nine months since that room was last used. That is what the written word says over you and not a comfort I have chosen for a woman with a bin bag, and the Holy Spirit who filled that circle on the good nights is the evidence that the keeping was never being done by the person who unlocked the door.

Look at what that does to the arithmetic. If the keeping is His, then eleven chairs still in a circle is information about national staffing decisions made by people who have never met you. It is not information about your faithfulness, and it never had the standing to become that.

And they did not go back to nowhere

Here is the second thing, and it is the part that has been eating you.

Everybody who needed it just went back to having nowhere. Look at the size of that claim. It says that between eleven people and God there was one room, and one Thursday, and one woman with a key, and that when she could not come, heaven had no other way in.

You do not believe that about anybody else. You have never once believed it about anybody else.

You have been carried through every one of those nine months, and so has each person who ever sat in that circle, and the carrying did not depend on a door being unlocked. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in Denise and her brother and the woman who did not speak, rather than waiting outside a locked side room for somebody's shifts to change.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it is not going to. Nothing here is telling you to reopen the room. Nothing is telling you to ask about Thursdays or find somebody else to hold it. If that circle stays exactly as it is until somebody stacks the chairs for a jumble sale, you have not stepped one inch outside the work of God, because that work is a person and it does not get suspended for want of a venue.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a kind thought to carry out with the spare bulbs. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not held in a doorway for nine months. And the thing in the way is not the rota and it is not the eleven. It is a sentence: I let it drop. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority holding a bin bag. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much strength you had left after a shift.

If these months have taken you somewhere darker than guilt, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.