The Ten Minutes Afterwards

The service is not the hard part.

Nobody says this out loud, but you know it. The singing is not the hard part. The talk is not the hard part. Even the bit where you have to greet the person next to you is only awkward for about four seconds and then it is over and everybody is relieved.

The hard part is the ten minutes afterwards.

Because in those ten minutes nothing is arranged. No one is leading. There is no order of service for a room full of people holding cups, and so what happens is that everybody does what water does, which is to find the channel it went down last time.

And here is the thing I want to put gently in front of you.

You already know the route.

Before the last song has finished, you know. You could not have written it down and you have never once thought about it, but somewhere behind your eyes there is a small map with three names on it, and when the music stops your feet will take you there the way a horse takes a lane home.

Same three people. Same corner. Same twelve minutes. Then the car park.

There is nothing wrong with the three people. That is what makes this hard to see. They are your friends, they love you, you would not swap them, and if this message ends with you avoiding them it has failed.

But you have been in that building for years and there are people in it whose names you do not know, and it is not because you are cold. It is because the ten minutes have never once been unarranged for you. They have been arranged the whole time, by you, without your knowledge.

Now let it sit a moment.

Do you already know, before the last song ends, exactly who you will be standing with?

Paul wrote a line about your feet

There is a verse in Romans that is usually read as if it were about attitude, and I think it is about geography.

Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited.Romans 12:16

Be willing to associate with. In the older English it reads condescend to men of low estate, which sounds terrible now and meant something quite physical then: go down to where they are. Move. Put your body in a different part of the room.

Paul is not asking for a warmer opinion of anybody. He is asking for a walk.

And that matters, because an opinion is very hard to change on purpose and a walk is not.

So let me tell you where you already are, because I think you have been harder on yourself about this than the Holy Spirit has.

You are somebody who has noticed. Most people never notice the route at all; it stays under the surface for a whole lifetime. The word says be willing to associate, and the willingness is the part you have been quietly assuming you lack, and you do not lack it, or you would have closed this by now.

The Holy Spirit does not usually change a life by changing a conviction. He changes it by making a familiar thing suddenly visible, and then waiting, without hurrying you, while you look at it.

He is doing that now. That is all this is.

And there is no shame in the route. Hear me. This house does not hand out verdicts on the room a person worships in, and it is not handing you one. The three people in the corner are a mercy. The years you have given that building are real. Nothing here is a prosecution.

The route is simply a habit, and habits are the easiest thing in the world to interrupt once, and interrupting them once is genuinely all that is being asked.

Something fell on a stable in Los Angeles in 1906, and what the witnesses could not get over was not what happened in the meeting. It was who was standing together afterwards. That was the part the city could not forgive, and nobody had organized it. The room simply stopped sorting itself once the Spirit had fallen on all of it.

The word says He was poured out on all people, and you are carrying that same Spirit into your own ten minutes on Sunday.