The Half Step Before You Arrive

You have never been able to describe it to anybody without it sounding like nothing, which is why you stopped trying about four years ago.

Here is the shape of it.

You are walking across a hall toward three people. They are talking. From twelve feet away it has a particular sound: quick, overlapping, a bit low, the sound of people who are in the middle of something.

And at about four feet, half a step before you arrive, it changes. Not into unfriendliness. The opposite, actually, which is what makes it impossible to name. It becomes warm and open and general. Somebody says your name. Somebody makes room. And the topic, whatever it was, becomes a topic anyone could join.

Then you stand there for a few minutes in a conversation about the car park.

And you have never once been able to work out whether they were being kind to include you, or whether the thing they were actually talking about was closed before you got there, and the difference between those two matters enormously and there is no way on earth to ask.

So for years you have been running an argument with yourself. One week you decide it is nothing and that you are a person who thinks too much. The next week it happens twice and you go home certain.

That is the part that has worn you out. Not exclusion. You could handle exclusion; exclusion is at least a fact you could stand on. What you have is a suspicion that renews itself every Sunday and can never be settled either way.

Jesus told a story about exactly this and He told it at a dinner

He was at a meal, watching people choose seats, and He said something that people usually read as advice about modesty. It is not advice about modesty. It is a description of who does the moving.

But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.Luke 14:10

Look at who speaks in that sentence. Not the guest. The host.

The whole movement upward in that story is done by somebody else's voice, and the guest's only part is to be somewhere the host can find them and to not have spent the evening arranging their own position.

Now hold that against four years of a hall.

You have been trying to establish your own standing in a room, in a hundred small ways, through an argument you conduct alone on the drive home every week. That is exhausting because it is a job that was never yours, and it was never yours because there is a Host in that building whose voice is the only one that moves anybody.

You are already seated by Him. The written word says the host is the one who says friend, go up higher, and the Holy Spirit is the one who set you in the body, and no adjustment in the register of a conversation has ever had a vote in it.

The half step is probably real, and it is probably not about you

I want to say the honest thing here rather than the comfortable one.

The comfortable thing is to tell you that you imagined it. You almost certainly did not. People do adjust when somebody arrives, and everybody does it, and you do it too, and it is usually not a judgement at all. A conversation about a hard thing goes general when a fourth person arrives because the three did not want to make the fourth carry something they did not ask for.

The uncomfortable thing is that it is also sometimes exactly what you fear, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because you would stop trusting me and you would be right to.

Here is what is true whichever it is on any given Sunday: it is not a ruling on your standing, and it is not information about your worth, and it does not tell you one single thing about whether you belong in that room.

You belong in that room by decree. His word puts the moving and the honoring in the Host's mouth, and the Holy Spirit placed you in that body, and neither of those has ever been up for review by a group of three people near a radiator.

What a plain hall in Los Angeles solved

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall in Los Angeles and made a decision about it that people still repeat: no seat in the room could be rented by anybody.

He was not solving rudeness. He was solving arithmetic.

In a room with bought pews, everyone runs a sum, every week, whether they want to or not. Where am I sitting, what does it mean, has it changed. The sum is not vanity; it is unavoidable, because the room publishes the answer and the eye reads it before the mind decides not to.

Bresee took the published answer away, and with it the sum, and what that gave people was not mainly a seat. It was the end of the calculation.

That is what you have actually lost. Not friends, not a place. The quiet. Four years of a running calculation across a hall.

You are seated already and it is written and the Holy Spirit is the one who did it, so the sum can stop even if the half step never does.