Stand Here, Next To Me

The band sets up in the square every Sunday afternoon between the fruit stalls and the fountain, and by the second number there are eighty people round it and half of them are clapping in the wrong place.

There are two trumpets who argue all week and play like one instrument. There is a woman on the bass drum who is older than the square and straps it on with a piece of webbing off a suitcase. There is a boy of about twelve called Nico who stands at the edge of it, near the amp, and has done for four months.

Nico plays nothing. He does not own anything you could play. He is not learning, nobody is teaching him, and he has never once been asked to carry a case or hold a stand, because the truth is there is no job for him and everybody knows it. He turns up, he stands just outside the ring of chairs where the pavement changes color, and he watches the woman's hands on the drum.

Then one Sunday, halfway through the third number, without stopping and without making anything of it, she jerks her chin at the six inches of pavement beside her and says four words over the top of the horns.

"Stand here, next to me."

And that is the whole thing that happens. He does not get an instrument. He does not get a part. He gets six inches of pavement, on the inside of the ring, in the middle of the noise, and for the rest of that afternoon he is inside the band instead of next to it, and he did not do anything, and he did not bring anything, and nobody asked him for anything at all.

You know exactly where Nico was standing before that.

Because there is a shelf of verses you have quietly stopped reading. Not out of rebellion. You just noticed, somewhere along the line, that they seem to be addressed to people who have something in their hands, and you do not, and you got tired of reading somebody else's post. So you skip them now. You have got very good at skipping them, and you have never said this out loud to a single human being.

Where God is standing, and who told you otherwise

Let us start with where He actually is, because that is a fact and not an offer.

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.Psalm 34:18

Read the verb. Is near. Not comes near when conditions improve. Not draws near to those who approach correctly. Is near, stated flat, in the present tense, about a category of person defined entirely by what has happened to them and not at all by what they produced.

So take this as said over you rather than around you. You are not standing at the edge of anything. God is near to you at this hour, and the nearness was not priced, invoiced or made conditional on the state of your hands. That is Psalm 34:18 speaking rather than my sympathy, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying it into the room you are sitting in right now.

And notice which way the verse runs. It does not describe a person moving toward God. It describes God's position relative to a person who is at the end of themselves. Somebody somewhere has taught you the opposite motion, and I am not going to name them or argue with them, because the correction is not an argument. It is a location.

The invitation itself has no counter

Now to the loudest verse in the Bible on this subject, and it is loud precisely because it was written for people with nothing.

Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.Isaiah 55:1

Every clause in that is doing the same job. Come. Come. Come. And the one qualification named in the whole sentence is thirst, which is not an achievement, and the one group singled out for a personal mention is the group with nothing to hand over.

That is not a loophole. That is the front door.

You have been invited on those exact terms and the terms are already settled, so there is nothing standing between you and the water except a habit of skipping the page. Isaiah 55:1 puts the invitation in God's own mouth with no counter to pay at, and the Holy Spirit is the One holding that door open in front of you while you read this.

Hear what that means for the shelf of verses you stopped reading. They were not written past you. Some of them were written directly at you, and you have been treating a personal letter as somebody else's post, and nobody corrected it because you never told anybody.

Nothing is being asked of you here either

Let me be as plain as I know how, because this article knows what it is and who is reading it.

Nothing is being asked of you. Not a small thing instead of a large thing. Not a token, not a gesture, not time offered in place of something else. There is no line further down where this turns into a request, and there is no version of you that is more welcome here than the one holding this page.

You have nothing to bring and that has not changed your standing by one inch, because the word never made your standing a function of your hands, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been keeping you near the noise for four months while you thought you were only watching.