Eleven Years Since The Altar

She goes down to the front nearly every time they call it.

Not in a showy way. She waits until the second or third song, and she goes down the side aisle, and she stands about four rows back from the actual front because standing at the very front makes her feel like she is asking for something. She closes her eyes. She lifts her hands, or sometimes she just puts them in her pockets. And she waits.

Eleven years.

When she was twenty two she went down at a Tuesday night service that nobody expected anything from, and the floor came up to meet her. That is how she says it. The floor came up to meet me. She was down there a long time and she got up different, and for about a year afterward she could not tell the story without crying, and now she can, which is its own small grief.

Since then: nothing. Not nothing in her life, she would want me to be clear about that. Her marriage is good. Her son is fine. She teaches the eight to eleven year olds and she is good at it and she loves them.

But at the front, on the carpet, in the moment when it used to happen: nothing. Eleven years of standing four rows back with her eyes closed, waiting to be knocked over.

And last month, in the car, with the engine off and the church emptying out behind her, she said out loud to nobody: "Maybe that was my turn."

I want to get in front of that sentence before it settles any further into her, because it is not true, and because it is the kind of thing a person can believe for the rest of their life without ever once saying it to another human being.

He did not put the well at the front of the room

There is a woman at a well in the middle of the day, which is the wrong time to be at a well, and Jesus asks her for a drink and then turns the whole conversation inside out.

She is talking about locations. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, she says. You say Jerusalem. She is doing what people do: sorting out which address the presence of God is at.

And He will not have the conversation on those terms.

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.John 4:14

Take that in the row you are sitting in. You have the source inside you and not down the front. The word says the water He gives becomes a well springing up, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who is that water in a woman at nine at night.

In him. A well of water, in him. Not a spring you visit. Not a fountain in a courtyard you have to get to before it closes. A well, sunk in a person, with the water rising.

So hear this where you are, and know that it is not encouragement I invented for you: the well is in you right now, as you read this. His word says the water He gives becomes a well inside the one who drinks, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who is that living water, which means the source is not four rows back from a stage in a building that locks at nine.

Eleven years you have been going to a well you are carrying.

Now let me be careful, because I am not about to tell you the altar is nothing. I have seen too much on too many carpets to say that. God meets people at the front of rooms. He met you there when you were twenty two and He knocked you flat, and it was Him and it was real and it changed the direction of your life.

He is simply not obliged to knock over somebody who is already standing in the right direction.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God in a small room, in a meeting he did not want to attend, while somebody read aloud from a preface. His heart was strangely warmed. That is the famous half of the sentence. Here is the half that is never quoted: he did not go back to that room.

He built a timetable and then he took it outside the walls.

Small groups meeting at a set hour where a few people asked each other plain questions out loud. Preaching in fields because they shut the buildings to him. Standing in a colliery yard at five in the morning, watching tears cut white lines down the black faces of men coming up off a shift. Years and years in prisons with people who had nothing to give him back. The name that got fixed on those people was invented as a mockery of how methodical they were, and they took it and kept it.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is a schedule and nothing more. He held both, and holding both meant he stopped waiting for the room.

You are not required to reproduce it. Let that go all the way down, because it is what has had you standing four rows back for eleven years. Nowhere is it written that God owes a second flooring to somebody He already flooded. Scripture says He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit, and His Spirit is the one making that true in a car with the engine off in an emptying parking lot.