I Run The Children's Room

Four years.

She has been in that building every Sunday for four years and she has been in about six minutes of the actual service in all that time, and every one of those six minutes was because somebody was late relieving her.

She runs the children's room and she is superb at it.

Twenty-two children on a good week, three helpers, a plan for every age group, a craft that actually works, and a way with the difficult ones that nobody else in that church has got.

Parents ask for her specifically. She does not know how to receive that when they say it and she changes the subject.

And here is the thing she has never said to a single person.

She has not been prayed for in four years. Nobody has asked her a serious question in four years. She has not sung a whole song, or heard a whole talk, or sat down in that building for longer than it takes to eat a biscuit, since the year she took it on.

She is not resentful. Everybody assumes that is what this is and it is not, and if you said it to her she would be genuinely upset, because she loves those children and she chose this and she would choose it again.

It is that something has gone quiet in her and she has nowhere to take it, because the room where people take things is the room she is not in.

So let me ask you.

When did you last sit through a whole service?

He used a word with no roles in it

There is a moment in John where Jesus stands up in the middle of a festival and shouts something, and the setting matters.

It is the last day, the great day. There has been a whole week of ceremony involving water, and the crowd is enormous, and everybody there has a place and a role and a reason to be where they are standing.

And He stands up and says this.

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me and drink.John 7:37

Anyone.

Now hold that word up against a building on a Sunday morning.

There is no role in that sentence. There is no exception for the people who are working. There is no clause about whether you are in the main room or the side room, whether you are holding a glue stick or a hymn book, whether you are twenty-two children's supervisor or somebody in row four with nothing to do.

The only qualification in that sentence is thirst.

And notice what He does not do. He does not lower His voice for the ones who are busy. He shouted it, in a crowd, on the day when everybody had a job.

Hear where you stand, four years into a side room.

You are not outside the invitation. Scripture puts anyone in the mouth of Jesus at the top of His voice on the busiest day of the year, and the Spirit has never checked whether somebody was on a rota before He would meet them.

And I want to say the practical thing, because you are a practical person and a lovely sentiment will not survive contact with your Sunday.

Nobody is going to fix this for you.

That is not a criticism of your church and I am not making one. It is simply true that a woman who runs a room beautifully generates no problem for anybody else to notice, and people do not investigate things that are going well.

So the useful question is not how the arrangement gets changed. It is where you are going to drink.

And it does not have to be the main room. That is the assumption underneath four years of this, and it is not in the text anywhere. Anyone has no location in it either.

You have a room. It has crayons in it and it is empty at ten past nine.