When You Are In A Better Place

Two years and eight months.

You did not leave. That is the thing you have to hold on to and it is also the thing that has made this so slow. Nothing happened. There was no falling out, nobody hurt you, you did not stop believing anything.

You went less, and then you went occasionally, and then there was a stretch in the second winter where you did not go for eleven weeks and nobody rang, and by the time you noticed that nobody had rung you had been out longer than you had ever intended.

And the whole time, the whole two years and eight months, you have had a plan.

The plan is that you will go back when you are in a better place with it. When you have got your praying going again. When the thing that has been going on inside you has settled enough that you would not be walking in as a mess.

You have never said that plan out loud to anybody but you could recite it, and it has never once occurred to you that it is a strange plan.

Here is the arithmetic nobody has ever put in front of you.

You have been getting further from that place, not nearer, for the whole two years and eight months, because the thing that was going to fix you was the thing you stopped doing.

Paul puts the timing in the middle of the sentence

There is a verse people know so well they have stopped reading the middle of it, and the middle of it is a clock.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

While we were yet sinners.

Read that as a statement about timing rather than a statement about sin, because that is what it is. Paul is not making a point about how bad anybody was. He is making a point about when.

Not after. Not once there had been some movement. Not at the moment anybody was in a better place with it. While. In the middle. At the worst point of the whole thing, with no improvement anywhere in sight.

That is the timing of the central act of God toward the human race, and it is the exact opposite of the plan you have been running for two years and eight months.

So take this now, before we go further. You are met in the middle and never at the end. The written word puts the whole weight of God's love at the point of no improvement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that, and there has never been a version of Christianity in which a person qualifies first.

Name what the waiting has actually been

Let me say the honest thing about what has been happening, because it deserves its full size before anything gets lifted.

You have been carrying something for the better part of three years and you have been carrying it alone. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

That is not a small thing and I am not going to hurry past it. Whatever it is, it has been in you, unshared, on every one of those Sundays you did not go, and the reason it has not settled is not that you have not tried. It is that some things do not settle inside one person.

And the plan you made was not stupid. It came from a decent instinct, which is that you did not want to bring a mess into a room and make it everybody's problem. There is something almost honorable in that.

But it has functioned as a lock, and it is a lock with the key on the inside of a room you are not in.

You are welcome in the middle of it. His word times the whole thing at while, and the Holy Spirit has not been waiting at the far end for a better version of you, and nothing about two years and eight months has changed the standing invitation.

The plain hall and what it did not ask

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and would not let anybody rent a seat.

The reason that hall filled from the street was not that its preaching was better than anybody else's. It was that there was no threshold condition.

Everywhere else in that city there was something to be, in order to come in. Not always money. Usually respectability, sobriety, presentability, a certain state, and everybody in those neighbourhoods knew precisely what they were and precisely whether they qualified.

That hall asked for nothing at the door, and people came in mid-collapse, and that is the entire reason anybody is still writing about it.

You have been applying a threshold to yourself that the founding of this whole tradition existed to abolish.

The written word puts God's love at the while and not the after, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding that door.