The Room Moved And I Did Not

The room went up and she stood in the middle of it like a fence post.

That is her phrase, not mine. She said it to me afterwards in a kitchen at about midnight and then laughed in a way that was not really a laugh.

It was a real night. She would be the first to tell you that. She is not one of those people who stands at the back deciding everything is worked up. She has seen enough over enough years to know the difference, and this was not that. People she has known for twenty years were undone. A man she considers unshakeable was on his knees.

And she stood in the middle of it, in the fourth row, with her hands up, and felt nothing.

Not resistance. Not doubt. Not anger. Nothing at all, in the specific way that is far worse than any of those, which is the way of a person watching weather through glass.

And here is the sentence that arrived in the car park, and it is not the one you would expect, because she is not a woman given to self-pity.

It is not that God was not there. He was obviously there. He was there for everybody in that room except me, and that is a much more particular thing.

Now let me ask you.

What did you decide about yourself the night the room moved and you did not?

Peter said it out loud and nobody corrected him

There is a morning on a lake where a professional fisherman is washing his nets after a night that produced absolutely nothing, and Jesus gets into his boat and tells him to go out and let the nets down again.

And Peter says something that I want you to hear without any polish on it.

Master, we have worked hard all night and haven't caught anything. But because You say so, I will let down the nets.Luke 5:5

Hear the two halves of what he says, and hear that nobody corrects the first one. You are allowed to report an empty night out loud, beloved, and the Spirit has never held an honest account against the person who gave it.

Two halves and both of them matter.

The first half is a flat statement of an empty night, said out loud, to Jesus, in front of witnesses. He does not spiritualize it. He does not say the Lord's timing is perfect. He says: we worked, all night, and there is nothing in the boat.

And Jesus does not correct him. Not one word. There is no rebuke about his attitude, no suggestion that the empty night was a diagnosis, no explanation offered at all for why the fish were not there.

The empty night is simply allowed to have been an empty night.

Now beloved, hear what that does to a woman standing in a fourth row like a fence post.

You are not the one person God stepped around. Scripture lets Peter report an empty night to Jesus' face without a single word of correction, and the Holy Spirit has never worked a room and deliberately gone past somebody in it.

And I am going to say the hard, freeing thing now, and I want you to sit still for it.

You do not know what happened in you that night.

You know what you felt, and I am not dismissing that, and I am not going to be one of those people who tells a woman her experience did not count. But feeling is a sense and it is not a measurement. It tells you about the weather in a room. It does not have the authority to tell you what God did or did not do, and it certainly does not have the authority to tell you who He skipped.

Peter's boat was empty and Peter could see it was empty. That was a fact. What he could not see, at that exact moment, was where the fish were, and they were about four feet away.

The word says he let the net down because Jesus said to, and it was not confidence that put it in the water. It was obedience with an entirely honest report attached.

The fire this house is named for fell in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906, and in that room, on those planks, night after night for three years, there were people who sat through whole meetings and felt nothing at all. Nobody ever wrote about them. The papers were interested in the ones who shouted.

He fell on the room, and a room is not the sum of what its people were feeling.

And you were not stepped around, beloved. Luke 5 lets a man report an empty night to Jesus without one word of correction, and the Spirit has never worked a room and deliberately gone past somebody in it.