Still In The Chair

She stopped going forward about four years ago and nobody noticed, which she thinks about more than she would like to.

For eleven years before that she went every time. Every appeal, every last hymn, every if that is you, just slip out of your seat. She went at conferences and she went in cold halls and she went once in a marquee in the rain with the sound of it on the canvas like applause. Hands on her shoulders. Good people praying with real love and no showmanship at all. She has nothing bad to say about a single one of them.

And she went back to her seat every time exactly as she had left it.

Not disappointed, at first. Then disappointed. Then, somewhere around year seven, something worse and quieter than disappointment, which is the thing she has never said out loud to anybody: she stopped believing the problem was the timing and started believing the problem was her.

So now she holds the coats. She is the one who knows where the second urn is. She is at the back with the bag of spare hymn books on her lap and she prays for other people with her eyes open and her voice steady, and last month she prayed for a lad of nineteen who had walked in off the street, and he came apart in the best possible way right there in the third row, laughing and wiping his face and saying what is happening over and over.

And she was so glad. That is the part I want you to hear. She was completely, genuinely glad, with no bitterness in it anywhere.

She drove home and did the washing up and stood at the sink with her hands in the water and said, out loud, to nobody, "Right. So it works, then."

You know that sink. Maybe your version is a prayer for a body that has not changed, or a room you have sat in for a decade, or a gift you were told to expect that has not turned up. And somewhere in there a small careful sentence got written about you, and you have never quite been able to unwrite it.

I want to go and look at where the waiting actually comes from, because I think somebody handed you the wrong meaning for it a long time ago.

The clock was never about you

Before the teaching, hear where you actually stand. You are not a person under review. Acts 1 says He told them to wait for the promise of the Father, and the Spirit has never used a delay to say something about somebody's worth.

The first waiting room in the whole story is the one He put them in Himself.

While He was together with them, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father.Acts 1:4

Notice the source of the wait. It is not a consequence. Nobody is waiting because they got something wrong, or because their faith needed strengthening first, or because there was a lesson to learn in the interval. Jesus tells them to wait. The waiting is issued, like an instruction, to people who had just spent forty days with the risen Christ.

And then they ask Him the question you have asked. They ask Him when. Is it now? Is this the time?

And His answer is one of the kindest things in the New Testament, and almost nobody reads it as kindness. He says it is not for them to know the times or the seasons, which the Father has placed under His own authority.

Sit with what that does. He does not say when you are ready. He does not say when you have prayed enough, or when the room is right, or when you finally believe it properly. He takes the whole question of timing out of their hands and puts it in the Father's, where it is held under an authority that has nothing to do with their performance.

Which means the clock was never a scoreboard. It never has been. If the timing sits with the Father, then the length of your wait is not a reading of your worth, and it never was, and the sentence you wrote about yourself in year seven was written with information nobody had any business giving you.

Now the other half, and this is the part that belongs to this house.

There was a room in Los Angeles in 1906, a converted stable on a short street, wooden crates and planks for benches, sawdust on the floor. A man named William Seymour, the son of former slaves, blind in one eye, who had learned what he knew sitting outside a doorway in another city because he had not been allowed to sit inside it.

And the thing the newspapers could not get over, the thing that upset them far more than any of the noise, was who was in that room together. Black and white, poor and comfortable, immigrant and native born, men and women, in a city and a century that had a great deal invested in keeping all of that apart. It fell across a line nobody else was willing to cross, in a building nobody respected, through a man nobody had credentialed.

I am not telling you that to point a finger at any church anywhere, including the ones that came out of that stable. Every one of them has people in it who love Jesus and are doing their best on a Tuesday. I am telling you because of what it says about who.

Whatever you have decided about being the wrong sort, the wrong background, the wrong temperament, too old, too odd, too quiet, too far gone: that room was full of people the whole city had already sorted into the wrong pile. And the Spirit did not consult the pile.

So here is what I can honestly say and what I will not say. I am not going to tell you it ends by a certain point, because I do not know and nobody who tells you otherwise does either. I am not going to tell you what would make it happen faster, because that is exactly the ladder you have been climbing for eleven years and it is not a ladder, it is a Person. And I am never going to tell you that your faith was the problem, because it was not, and I would rather this whole message went unwritten than have that sentence in it.

Here is what is true. You are waiting on the instruction of the One who issued the wait. Nothing has happened yet is a fact about the clock. It is not a fact about you.

And you have not been passed by. The word puts the waiting in His own instruction rather than in anybody's shortfall, and the Spirit who was promised to that room was promised to it while nothing at all was happening in it.