The Meeting I Am Not In

Tuesday, ten o'clock, a room she has been in twice for other reasons and can picture exactly.

The chairs. The screen on the wall that nobody uses. The window that looks onto a flat roof with a bucket on it that has been there since before any of this started.

She will not be in it. That is not a punishment and it is not unusual, it is simply how the thing works, and everybody has been very clear and very correct about it.

Her situation will be discussed by four people for somewhere between twenty and forty minutes and then they will decide.

And it is Sunday night.

So she has been doing what a person does with thirty-six hours and no access. She has been running it.

What she said in March, and how it might have sounded to the one who takes notes. Whether the email she sent on the ninth was too long. Whether she should send one more, tomorrow, that is short and warm and does not look like what it would be. Whether the woman who is chairing it liked her, and what she can remember about the two conversations they have had, and what either of them might have meant.

Thirty-six hours of trying to get a hand into a room she cannot get into.

And an hour ago she stopped in the middle of her own kitchen, because she had just prayed for eleven minutes and every single one of those minutes had been another attempt on the door.

And you know that, because there is a room where your life is being discussed and you have been trying to reach into it through God.

He is not the last door you have left to try

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and there are no steps in it anywhere.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in that famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written that He said, put me to the test (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that an offer a person can actually accept rather than a line they can only quote.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a whole nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating. And the thing worth noticing is the voice it is said in: not a manager's voice, not a system's. A Father's. Come and find out whether I am who you have decided I am. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who carries a sentence like that out of its own century and sets it down where you are standing.

Now the eleven minutes, because they deserve honesty rather than a scolding.

There is nothing wicked about what you were doing. You were frightened, and the door is shut, and God is the only party in this who is not bound by the door, and of course you went to Him. That is not a fault. That is a person going to the right place.

The trouble is what you were asking Him to be while you were there.

A mechanism is safe. That is why we all reach for one. If God operates by the right words in the right order, then Tuesday is not really out of your hands after all, and there is still something you can do at eight o'clock on Monday night.

And the price of that arrangement is the thing that stopped you in your own kitchen: if it is still something you can do, then whatever happens on Tuesday is still yours.

You are dealing with a Father, and a Father is not a door you work on, He is somebody you tell. Jesus put it in the plainest possible domestic terms: which of you, if his son asks for a fish, will give him a serpent, or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion (Luke 11:11). Nothing in that is operated. A child says a thing to a parent, and the parent is not the kind of person who hands over a scorpion. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who takes that off a page and gets it into a kitchen on a Sunday night.

Now the room itself, and what is actually true about it.

No room decides you, and God has never once been on the outside of a door. It is written that the king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord (Proverbs 21:1), which is a sentence about the most closed room in the ancient world, written by people with no access to it. Notice what it does not say. It does not say the stream will run where you want it. It says whose hand it is in. The Spirit is what makes that a comfort rather than a tease, because the comfort was never about control. It was about who is present.

And He is not waiting outside with you at ten o'clock on Tuesday.

Your Father is already in that room, and He was in it before the chairs were put out. It is written that where can I go from Your Spirit, or where can I flee from Your presence (Psalm 139:7), and the honest answer given is nowhere, and that includes a room with a flat roof outside the window and a bucket that has been there for years.

Now where the trust goes, because this is not an article about a feeling.

Trust is not a technique and has no steps, so nobody here is going to hand you any. It has an object. You name one real thing out loud, hand it over, and go to bed on Sunday.

Not money. Nothing on this site will ever ask you for that or route anything anywhere, including here. One real thing: Tuesday. The room. The version of your life that comes out of it.

You are owed nothing for trusting Him, and that is exactly what makes it trust rather than one more attempt on the door. It is written that we have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15). Nobody says Abba while trying a handle.

And one last thing.

If you find this hard, you are not doing it wrong. Handing over a thing you cannot reach is the hardest kind, and finding it difficult is not evidence about your faith. It is evidence that it matters and that you are awake.