Camera On, Nobody Knows

The call starts at half past nine and there are eleven faces in the grid.

He is third row, second from the left. The rectangle is doing what it always does: a man in a shirt in a room with a bookshelf behind him, nodding at the right moments, camera on, microphone muted.

This morning he moved the drying rack out of the shot before he logged in. He noticed himself doing it and thought nothing of it at the time.

Somebody shares a screen. Somebody else says the file did not open. There is a dog barking in one of the other rectangles and everyone smiles about it. A woman in the top row has a small child arrive at her elbow and hands him something off camera without breaking her sentence.

Then his name gets said, and there is a question about a deadline, and he unmutes and answers it. The answer is fine. It is more than fine. It is clear and it is helpful and it has a date in it, and somebody types a thumbs up in the chat.

He mutes again and goes back to being a small rectangle.

In the corner of the screen there is a little preview of his own face. He watches it produce a small polite smile at the right moment, twice, without being asked.

None of the eleven knows about Friday.

They are not bad people. Two of them would drive over tonight if they had any idea. It is simply that there is no version of typing it into a chat window that works, and no gap in the agenda that it fits in, and the meeting has ten minutes left and then there is a birthday thing at eleven.

You know this. Maybe it is not a call. Maybe it is a school gate, or a checkout line, or a Sunday morning where three people asked how you were and you said good thanks and meant to leave it there. Maybe you are living in a week that stopped, in a world where nobody else's week did.

Two things before anything else.

Nothing about this is your fault. Not the silence, not the smile, not the fact that nobody knows. It is not evidence that you built the wrong life or kept people at the wrong distance. Some weeks are simply not tellable at half past nine on a Tuesday, and that is a fact about the week.

And I am not going to explain what happened on Friday. I do not know why it happened. Nobody has appointed me to hand you a reason, and a reason arriving in the middle of a meeting is not company, it is a way of changing the subject.

The last thing He said, and the count of who heard it

At the very end of Matthew there is a hillside and a small group, and it is worth knowing exactly how small.

Eleven. The text says so plainly, and it says something else too, one verse before: that they worshipped him, but some doubted. Not afterward. Not later, when it wore off. While they were standing there.

So the last words in that Gospel are spoken over eleven men, some of whom are not sure, and this is what they are.

Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.Matthew 28:20

The word behind alway is not a vague forever. It is closer to all the days: each one, counted out, including the flat ones and the ones nobody hears about.

You are accompanied at half past nine on a Tuesday, in a room that nobody in that grid can see. That is not a warm thought I am adding. Matthew 28:20 hands the presence out day by day rather than in general, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a fact in a room rather than a doctrine about rooms.

Notice who it was said to. Eleven faces, some of them doubting while it was being said, and the promise was not adjusted for that. Nobody was asked to firm up first.

You have a presence with you that was promised to eleven men while some of them were doubting. The written word records the doubt and the promise in consecutive verses without treating one as a problem for the other, and the same Spirit who was given to that group is the one keeping this promise now.

You were not left behind when everybody else's Tuesday carried on. What is written puts Him with His people to the end of the age rather than for the parts of it they can explain to their colleagues, and His Spirit is the one who makes company felt by somebody sitting alone with a camera on.

Nobody knowing is not the same as being alone

Let us be exact about the ache, because it is a specific one.

It is not that people are cruel. In most cases they are not. It is that your life stopped in one afternoon and nobody else's did, and there is no polite mechanism for saying so. The gap between what is happening in your chest and what is happening in the meeting is enormous, and the meeting is not built to hold it.

And there is a reader here for whom it is worse than that, and I am not going to talk around them. Some people genuinely have nobody to call. Not a friend who would drive over, not a family member who could be told. If that is you, nothing on this page requires you to produce a person, and nothing here is going to imply the absence is your own doing.

You are companied by Someone who did not need to be told about Friday. Matthew 28:20 makes the presence His initiative and not a response to being informed, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as being sent to be with people rather than summoned by them.

There is a kind of company that requires you to explain yourself first. This is not that kind.

You have company here that does not depend on anybody in that grid noticing. What God has promised runs to the end of the age without a clause about who else is aware of it, and His Spirit is the one who makes an unnoticed room an accompanied one.