The Room Was Electric And I Was Stone

The organ was going and the drums were going and a woman two rows in front had her shoes off.

That is the detail she has kept for twenty-three years. Somebody's good church shoes, navy, with a low heel, lying on their sides in the aisle where their owner had stepped out of them without appearing to notice, and the owner up on her feet with both hands in the air and her whole body doing something that was not a decision.

The room was moving. Not metaphorically. The floor of that building had a bounce in it that everybody knew about and nobody had ever fixed, and when the whole place got on its feet at once you could feel it in the soles of your shoes.

She had come up out of that water eleven minutes earlier.

They had wrapped her in a white towel the size of a bedsheet and she had come through the side door into that noise with her hair flat and her heart going hard, and every single person in that building was rejoicing, out loud, about her.

And she felt nothing.

Not numbness. Not distress. Nothing, in the specific and awful sense of a perfectly calm interior in a room that was shaking. She remembers standing there with the towel around her shoulders, watching a pair of navy shoes lying in an aisle, thinking with complete clarity: I am the only person in here who is not having this.

She is fifty-one now.

She has spent twenty-three years in rooms like that. She loves them and she is not pretending. She raises her hands and means it. She has wept in worship, plenty of times, over other things and for other people.

But she has never had it, whatever it is that the woman with the shoes had, and she has drawn a conclusion about that which she has never said in any room with anybody in it: He moved on that whole building that night and He went round me.

Which voice you were listening for

I want to be careful here, because I am about to disagree with you, and you have been carrying this alone for twenty-three years and you deserve better than a clever answer.

So first, the true part. Something was happening in that room. I am not going to explain the woman with the shoes away, and I am not going to suggest the bounce in the floor accounts for it. God moves on rooms. That building was not experiencing weather.

The part I am going to disagree with is the conclusion, and the reason I am going to disagree with it is not kindness. It is that the conclusion requires you to know where God was, and you were working from a very narrow sample of what He sounds like.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.1 Kings 19:12

That is Elijah, on a mountain, at the lowest point of his life, and God puts on a show. Wind that breaks rocks. An earthquake. A fire.

And three times in two verses, the text says the same thing: the LORD was not in it.

I want you to feel how strange that is. The wind and the earthquake and the fire were not fakes. They were sent. God laid them on, and then the text goes out of its way to tell us He was not in them, and after all of it there was a still small voice, and that was where He was.

You were in a room full of what God had laid on, listening for Him in the register you had been taught to expect, and that is not my consolation, it is a thing Scripture goes out of its way to say, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing in the conclusion rather than in your knowledge of 1 Kings.

Now let me say something about what you actually describe, because I think you have misfiled it.

You describe a perfectly calm interior in a room that was shaking. You have called that nothing for twenty-three years.

Consider that it may have been the still small voice, and that you have spent twenty-three years listening past it because it did not sound like an organ.

I am not going to insist on that. I was not there and I do not do that. But I will say this plainly: you are not somebody God went round. The word says the Lord was not in the earthquake, which means presence and volume are not the same measurement, and the Spirit of God who was in that towel-wrapped woman eleven minutes after the water has been with you for twenty-three years since.

I want to touch the loneliness of it, too.

You have never said this in a room with anybody in it. Twenty-three years of standing in buildings where the thing you cannot do is the thing everybody is doing, and privately concluding that you were skipped.

That is a heavy and a lonely way to worship, and I am sorry it has been that way. You have been faithful in rooms that made you feel like an exception, and Scripture never once makes the felt register the qualification, and the Spirit has been the one bringing you back into those rooms year after year, which is not the behavior of a God who went round somebody.

And here is the last of it. You are one of His, and you were one of His under that towel, watching a pair of navy shoes lying on their sides in an aisle. The word settles it, the Spirit is the seal, and a building with a bounce in the floor was never the instrument that could tell you otherwise.