Two Years Of Visiting

Eleven rooms in twenty-six months. She has a list on her phone, which she started as a practical thing and which has become something else.

The first one had very good coffee and a woman on the door who said "first time?" and meant it kindly, and she said yes, and the woman said "lovely" and turned to somebody else, and that was the whole of it.

The fourth one gave her a card to fill in. She filled it in properly, with her actual number, and nobody rang, and she has thought about that far more than a grown woman ought to.

The seventh one was the one she nearly stayed at. She went four times. On the fourth visit a man remembered her name, which nearly undid her in the car afterwards, and then he was not there the next week or the week after, and she found out later he had been visiting from somewhere else.

The eleventh is where she goes now. She has been going since March. She sits about two thirds back on the left. Nobody has learned her name and she has stopped, at some point she could not identify, expecting anybody to.

She is thirty-four. She moved for a job, and the job is good, and she does not regret it.

And here is what she has never said out loud, because there is nobody to say it to, which is the whole difficulty: she has been thinking about this one particular thing for about a year and a half, and it is the sort of thing you have to ask somebody about, and she does not have a somebody.

Not a difficult somebody. Not a somebody she is avoiding. There is simply, in a city of that size, in eleven rooms across twenty-six months, no person she could ring on a Tuesday and say can I ask you about something.

The arranging is not on you

I want to say something at the top that I think nobody has said, because most of what gets said to a person in your position is a suggestion.

You have done the work.

Eleven rooms. Twenty-six months. A card filled in with your real number. Four visits to the seventh one. In weather, on your own, after a working week, without anybody knowing whether you turned up. That is not a woman who has failed to try, and if anybody, including the voice in your own head, has been filing this under something you are not doing well enough, that filing is wrong and I want it out of the way before anything else.

The arranging of your belonging is not a task you have been failing.

Now here is what is actually true of you while you sit two thirds back on the left.

Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.Hebrews 13:5

Look at the tense of the reporting verb. He hath said. Past. Completed. The writer is not making a promise on God's behalf; he is quoting one that was already made, centuries earlier, to people in a wilderness, and he is treating it as a standing fact that the reader may lean on this morning.

And look at what the promise is actually against. Not loneliness in general. The specific fears are being left and being forsaken, which are the two things a person in a new city in an eleventh room is quietly braced for.

You are somebody God has said He does not leave or forsake, and He said it before you got there, and that is not encouragement, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing in the two-thirds-back seat rather than in the general fund of things you know about God.

Now let me say something about the card.

You filled it in with your actual number and nobody rang. And you have thought about that more than a grown woman ought to, which is your phrase and not mine, and I would like to gently disagree with it.

You put your real number on a piece of card and handed it to strangers. That is a small act of courage and it cost something, and the fact that it produced nothing is a fact about an administrative system in a building, and it is not a fact about you.

You are already known, by name, without a card. Scripture says He has said it and it stands, and the Spirit of God has been with you in all eleven of those rooms, including the one with the good coffee where a woman said lovely and turned away.

I want to be careful and practical about the thing you have been carrying for a year and a half, because that is the actual subject.

It is the sort of thing you have to ask somebody about. You are right, and I am not going to pretend a page can be your somebody.

What I will say is this: find one person. Not a congregation, not a community, not a place to belong, which is the enormous thing you have been trying to build for twenty-six months. One person, who could be asked one question.

And I am going to stop there, warmly, and not tell you who or where, because I do not know your city and anybody writing to you from a distance who names a building or a kind of church for you is guessing with your life.

You are not disqualified from anything by not having found them yet. The word says He does not leave, and the Spirit is the one who has kept you going back on Sundays with nobody expecting you, which is a stubborn and unglamorous kind of faith and He has not missed one week of it.

You are already known, by name, and no card was ever involved in it. Scripture says He has already said He does not leave or forsake, past tense, spoken long before you moved, and the Holy Spirit has been in all eleven of those rooms with you.