I Have Started Arriving Late

Six minutes. That is the size of it now.

He used to be there twenty minutes before. He liked the empty room, the sound of the chairs, the way somebody would be at the front working something out on a keyboard.

Then at some point, and he genuinely could not tell you when, it became five minutes before. And then arriving as it started. And now, for about a year, six or seven minutes after, which means he comes in during the second song, when nobody looks round.

Nobody has said anything. Nobody would.

And here is the part that matters, and it is the reason I am telling you about him rather than about somebody who left.

He has not stopped going.

Fifty-one Sundays out of fifty-two, more or less, for a year, arriving six minutes late. That is not a man drifting away. That is a man doing something very deliberate with a great deal of consistency, and if you asked him what it was he would not be able to tell you.

I think I know what it is, and I think you know too, because you would not have got this far otherwise.

Six minutes is exactly enough to miss the part where you have to decide whether you are going to mean it.

So let me ask you.

When did you start arriving late, and who decided that?

The homesickness has no complaint in it anywhere

There is a psalm about a building and it is one of the most physically homesick things in Scripture.

The man who wrote it is not in Jerusalem. He is somewhere else, and he wants to be there, and the way he says it is almost embarrassing.

He is jealous of the birds. He says so. He says the sparrow has found a home and the swallow has a nest near the altar, and the point of that line is that a bird gets to be in that building all the time and he does not.

Better is one day in Your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.Psalm 84:10

Now here is the thing I want you to notice about the whole psalm, and it took me a long time to see it.

There is not one complaint in it about the building.

Not one. He does not say the courts have got worse. He does not compare it unfavourably with how it used to be, or mention anything about the priests, or the singing, or the state of the place.

His entire ache is about not being there.

Hear where that puts you, six minutes into a habit you never chose.

You are not a man who has stopped wanting it. Scripture puts a whole psalm of homesickness in the mouth of somebody who never once criticized the room he was missing, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people never once treated a man's slow feet as evidence that his heart has gone.

And I want to say something carefully now, in the way this house always says this, because there is a version of this article that would be a knife.

Nothing here says a word against your building or the people in it. Not one word, and if you go away from this with a criticism in your hands you have picked up something I did not put down. This is not a message about a room that has failed. It is a message about a man who has started coming in during the second song.

And now the honest part, which is that six minutes is a decision, and you made it, and you have never once said it out loud.

It is protective. That is what it is. If you arrive in the middle of something you cannot be at the start of it, and if you are not at the start of it you never have to make the decision that the start of a thing asks of a person.

The word says better is one day in Your courts than a thousand elsewhere, and the man who wrote it was outside wishing he were in, and you have been inside arranging to be slightly outside.

And you are not a man who has stopped wanting it. Psalm 84 is a whole song of homesickness with no complaint about the building anywhere in it, and the Holy Spirit never treated slow feet as evidence that a heart has gone.