She Stopped Going on Wednesdays

She is parked across the road with the engine off, and the hall lights are on, and she can see most of it through the long window.

The urn is out. Somebody is pulling the stacking chairs into a ring, which takes longer than it should because the chairs catch on each other. A man she likes very much is carrying a plate of cookies from the kitchen with both hands, walking the way people walk when they are carrying something that might slide.

It is four minutes to seven.

She has been coming on Wednesdays for nine years. She knows where the mugs are. She knows which chair has the wobble.

She sits there for eleven minutes.

And what is keeping her in the car is not the people. She wants to be very clear with herself about that, because it would be easier if it were the people. It is the sequence.

Somebody will say how are you. That happens in the first ninety seconds, near the urn, and it is meant kindly and it is not a small question in that room. And she will have to either say fine, which is a lie she is no longer any good at, or say the true thing, and if she says the true thing then in about twenty minutes eight people are going to close their eyes and somebody is going to pray about it out loud.

And they will say things. Good things. Things she used to say to other people, in that room, in that voice.

And she does not know what she would do with her face while they said them.

At nine minutes past seven the doors close and she can hear the first song faintly, and at eleven minutes past she starts the car.

She is home by twenty past. She puts the kettle on. The evening stretches out in front of her, enormous and empty, and it is only twenty past seven.

Here is the thing she has not told anybody, and would not, and it is the actual reason she is in the car and not in the ring of chairs.

Everything she currently has to say to God is an accusation.

Not a doubt. Not a question of the interesting kind. An accusation, with a name on it and a date, and she cannot make it come out any other way, and she has stopped trying.

That is you.

Maybe yours is Sunday instead. Maybe it is a small group, or a phone call from somebody who will want to pray with you, or a text you have read four times and not answered. And underneath it is the same thing: you have something to say to God that you cannot say in company, and you are not sure you are allowed to say it at all.

I am not going to explain any of it to you. I do not know why this happened. And I am not going to talk you back into that hall tonight either, because that is not what is wrong and we both know it.

The book opens on the complaint

I want to show you something about where your sentence already lives.

There is a book in the Bible that opens, at the very top, with no introduction and no throat clearing, on a man shouting at God about how long this has been going on and about God not doing anything. Not chapter three. Not a low moment he later repents of. The first line.

O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!Habakkuk 1:2

Read it again and notice the two accusations in it, because they are not small. You are not hearing me. You are not saving.

That is in the canon. Somebody copied it out by hand. Somebody read it aloud in a congregation. It has a chapter and a verse on it, the same as the comforting ones do, and the Spirit who breathed the comforting ones breathed this.

You are not disqualified by what you currently have to say to God, and the sentence you cannot say in a ring of chairs on a Wednesday is already printed in His own book with a number in front of it. Habakkuk 1:2 is the opening line of a prophetic book that God saw fit to keep, and it is the Holy Spirit who carried that man's complaint into Scripture rather than quietly tidying it on the way through.

And it gets stronger later, not weaker. A few lines on he asks God why He looks at treacherous people and holds His tongue. That is not a man expressing a concern. That is a man saying: I have watched You do nothing.

You have not lost God by how you feel about Him this week, and there is no sentence you could form tonight that would put you outside what is written. The word carries that man's questions at full volume and never once labels them unbelief, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a person company inside a question that is still open.

He did not correct the tone

Now watch what happens next in that book, because this is the part that mattered to me when I was somewhere near this myself.

God answers.

And when He answers, He does not begin by addressing the man's attitude. There is no how dare you. There is no reminder about who He is speaking to. There is no requirement that Habakkuk go away and come back when he can ask nicely.

He answers the man who spoke to Him like that.

You are heard, and the quiet you have been getting is not an assessment of whether you deserved to be. That is what is written into the shape of Habakkuk itself, a complaint and then a reply and then another complaint and then another reply, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a conversation like that possible for somebody who currently has nothing polite to bring to it.

I am not going to tell you why this happened to you. I do not know. Habakkuk did not get his why either; he got an answer, and it was not the same thing as an explanation.

But I will say the other half of that plainly, because somebody has probably implied the opposite to you kindly and it has been sitting in you ever since. Your anger is not a failure of faith. Your questions are not unbelief. A person who is arguing with God is a person who is still facing Him, and the only people who have nothing to accuse Him of are the people who have stopped talking.

You have a God who did not need protecting from that man and does not need protecting from you. Scripture kept the accusation on the page instead of on a note somewhere, and His Spirit is not embarrassed by anything you would say if the car door were shut.