It is four minutes. You worked it out over about a year and a half, without ever writing it down, the way a man works out the one board on his porch that creaks.
Get there at the hour and you are standing in the foyer with everybody, and there is handshaking, and somebody looks down. Get there at ten past and the whole room turns around, because ten past is late enough to be an event.
Four minutes. The singing has started, everybody is facing forward, the door at the back does not squeal if you take it slow, and you can be in a chair before one person has to decide what to do with their face.
Your boots are good boots. That is worth saying out loud. They are Redwings and they have been resoled twice and they are the reason your back still works at fifty-one. But they have been on a roof and in a trench and through two winters of salt, and there is no amount of brushing that makes a boot look like a shoe.
You tried it once. Went out at half past six in the dark and did them properly with a rag and a tin, and stood in the kitchen in the light, and looked at them, and thought: it is still a boot.
So now it is four minutes, and it has been four minutes for a year and a half, and here is the thing that got you. Last month your youngest, who is nine, asked you in the car why you always make her hurry and then wait in the car park.
She has learned the four minutes. She thinks it is a rule about time.
The oldest mistake in the book, made by a prophet
There is a scene where God sends a prophet to a farm to anoint a king, and the prophet gets it wrong immediately, in the first thirty seconds, before he has done anything else.
The eldest son walks in. Tall, well made, exactly what a king is supposed to look like, and Samuel says to himself, this is certainly the one. And God stops him mid thought.
For the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.1 Samuel 16:7
Read who is being corrected there. Not the crowd. Not the family. The prophet. The man in the room most likely to hear from God got the room wrong by looking at it, and God said so plainly and out loud.
So take this now, at the front of the page, while the boots are still on your feet. You are not on trial in that doorway. The written word says the Lord looks at the heart, and the Holy Spirit who anointed that boy in front of his own brothers has never once needed a man to change his footwear before He would do it.
And note what came next in that story. God did not pick the tall one and He did not pick the second or the third. He picked the one who was not even called in from the field, the one whose own father did not think to include him in the line, and He made him king in front of everyone who had.
You are not the afterthought in your room. You were the one He came for, and it is written, and His Spirit was on the choosing.
A plain hall and a plain rule
There was a man named Phineas Bresee who started over in a hall in Los Angeles in 1895, and he made one rule that people still repeat, which is that not one seat in the place could be rented.
That mattered more than it sounds. In those days you could buy a pew, and everybody knew what the rows meant, and a man in working clothes knew where he was expected to be before he sat down. Bresee took the whole system out. Free seats, all of them, and the ones who came in with nothing came in first.
I am not telling you that because your church has done anything wrong. I have no idea what your church has done, and I would not lay a word against a room I have never sat in. Your people may be kind. Very likely they are.
I am telling you because you built a rented pew all by yourself, out of four minutes, and you have been paying for it every Sunday for a year and a half in the only currency you had left.
You have the same standing in that room as any man in it. Not a similar standing. The same. The word says the Lord looks at the heart and the Spirit of God seated you there Himself, and neither of those two facts has ever been reviewed on the strength of a boot.
The four minutes has to go, and it has to go all at once, because a thing like that cannot be negotiated down.
Not three minutes next week and two the week after. You know what happens if you do that. You will find a new reason by Easter.
So: this Sunday, be early. Not on the hour. Early, with the doors open and the chairs still being set out and hardly anybody in yet, so that you are standing there when they arrive instead of the other way round.
It will be uncomfortable and it will pass. And you can stand in it, because the written word already settled where you stand and the Holy Spirit is the one holding your feet still while the old habit shouts.
And put your daughter's question down where you can see it. She thinks the four minutes is a rule about time. Do not let her learn what it is actually a rule about.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud in the truck before you walk in, with the engine off. The right to speak them was never earned by what a man has on his feet. It is Christ's own authority, delegated, and because you are in Christ it has been given to you whole, in your working clothes. Speak them under not my will, but Thine: He honors in His own way and in His own timing, and one awkward Sunday is never the measure of what He has already settled.
- Doorway, you have watched me come in sideways for the last time. The written word says the Lord looks at the heart, and the Holy Spirit seated me in this room before I ever timed my arrival to it.
- Shame, get off my boots and out of my truck. Jesus called in the son nobody bothered to send for and His Spirit anointed him where he stood, so I walk in at the hour, in the name of Jesus.
- Lord, You looked at my heart when the prophet was still looking at the height of a man, and Your word says it and Your Spirit does it. I sit down early, feet flat, and I am not hiding them again.
1 Samuel 16:7
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