Asked to Help With the Rota

Ten to twelve, and the foyer is at its loudest. The urn is hissing. Somebody's toddler goes past at knee height holding a cracker in each fist. There is a poster on the pin board that has curled at one corner since March and nobody has straightened it, and she has looked at that corner every Sunday since March.

She is holding a paper cup of instant coffee she did not want and took because it was handed to her.

The woman with the rota comes over, the laminated sheet held flat in its plastic sleeve. She is lovely. She has been lovely for six years, she runs the whole thing on a Thursday night at her own kitchen table, and she puts her hand on the arm as she comes, the way she does with everybody.

"Are you able to go back on for the ninth? I have got you down as a maybe."

And she hears her own voice say it. "Yes, of course. Put me down."

The pen does not work. The woman shakes it, laughs, does the scribble in the corner of the plastic sleeve, tries again. There is a small silence of maybe four seconds while the pen decides, and in those four seconds the whole foyer keeps going around them, and she stands there with the coffee she did not want, and thinks: nobody in this building knows.

Twelve days ago she was sitting in a different room with a different kind of silence in it and somebody said a sentence to her, and she has not been the same person since the middle of that sentence. She has driven, eaten, worked, answered messages, gone to bed. And here, on a Sunday at ten to twelve, the largest live question in the room is the ninth.

The pen works. Her name goes on the sheet. The woman squeezes the arm again and moves on to the next one, because there are eleven more names to fill and it is nearly noon.

That is you in the foyer with the coffee. Or that is you at the desk, on the group chat, in the family kitchen at Christmas, watching everybody else's ordinary Tuesday roll on while your ground is still moving underneath you.

Two things before anything else, and hear them in my voice, not in the polite one. Nobody around you failing to know is not your fault, and it is not a verdict on how loved you are. And I am not going to explain your twelve days to you. I was not told why either.

There is no room you can walk into ahead of Him

David asks a question in this psalm that most people read as poetry, and it was never poetry. It was a man testing the edges of the map to see where God stops.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:7-10

He tries up. He tries down. He tries the far side of the sea, the furthest edge a man of that century could imagine, and he finds the same thing at every edge: thou art there. Not thou wilt come if I call loudly enough. Not thou art there if somebody tells thee. Already there. Arrived first.

You are accompanied in that foyer whether or not one single person in it knows what your week has been. Psalm 139:8 makes His presence a fact about the place and not a reward for the telling, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that fact something a woman can feel under her feet on a Sunday morning.

You have not been left to carry this by yourself because nobody thought to ask. Nothing in the written word makes God's company conditional on another human being noticing first, and His Spirit was already in the room before the urn was switched on.

You were not alone in that room twelve days ago. Even there shall thy hand lead me, says Psalm 139:10, and even there is the strongest phrase in the whole psalm, because it means the worst room you have ever sat in was covered by the same promise as the best, and the Spirit of God was in that chair beside you while somebody said a sentence.

You are held by a right hand that got there before you did. That is what is written, and I am not softening it: the hand leads and the hand holds, both verbs belong to God, and it is the Holy Spirit who applies them to a real arm in a real foyer at ten to twelve.

Company that does not need to be told

Here is the part that matters most, and I am going to say it slowly, because some of you reading this have nobody to call. Not a short list. Nobody.

The company in Psalm 139 does not begin when you explain yourself. It does not wait for you to be understood. Nobody has to be informed, nobody has to say the right thing, nobody has to remember the date. The presence in that psalm is already in the room and was in the room first, and that is not second best to human company. It is the ground human company stands on.

You are not company God tolerates. You are company God keeps. His word says His hand leads and holds without one condition attached, and the Spirit is given as the Comforter precisely so that no one is ever accompanied only as far as the last friend who happened to notice.

You have a Presence with you that requires no explanation from you first. Psalm 139:7 asks where a person could go to get away from His Spirit and finds no such place, and that same Spirit is with a woman holding a paper cup she did not want.