Half six in the morning, and the hut is the warmest place on the whole site.
Nine feet by six. A kettle that takes four minutes and a shelf of everybody's mugs, and four men in it who have known each other longer than most marriages last. Danny does the crossword out loud and gets it wrong on purpose. Vic has not paid for a tea bag since 2011 and everybody knows and nobody has ever said. There are forty minutes before the machines start and there is nothing to do in them but talk.
He has invited two of these men to church. Twice.
Both times the same. A pause, a nod, then yeah, maybe, mate, and then the conversation moving on with a kindness that felt worse than a no. And afterwards, that hot feeling in the back of the neck all morning.
He stopped asking about eighteen months ago.
And here is what he has quietly decided about himself since. That he is a coward. That when it came to it, he loved being comfortable in a nine by six hut more than he loved four men, and that the proof is that he has said nothing for a year and a half.
He is wrong about that, and he has been wrong about it for eighteen months, and it has cost him a great deal.
And now I am going to stop saying he.
Because you have a hut. Maybe it is a hut. Maybe it is a school gate, or a ward handover at seven, or the two hours you spend every Saturday on the touchline with the same eleven parents. Maybe it is a group chat you have been in for nine years.
And you have been trying to move those people, across a town, into a building, on a morning they do not have free, to sit in rows and stand up when a stranger says to. And they have said yeah, maybe. And you have gone quiet.
He went to the table
Let me take the word coward off you first, because it does not belong to you and it has been doing damage.
You are not a coward. You are a man with one strategy that did not work, who then concluded there was something wrong with him rather than with the strategy. Those are extremely different diagnoses and you have been treating yourself for the wrong one.
And your building is not the problem either. I want to be plain about that, because the easy version of this message would run down the church you go to, and I will not do it. That building has held you through things nobody in the hut knows about. Keep it. Go on Sunday. Sing the songs, take the rota, stack the chairs.
It is simply not the only room you have got.
Look where He actually was when the trouble started.
Those who are well have no need of a healer, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.Mark 2:17
Take that at the counter. You are standing exactly where He sent people. The word says they that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick, and it is the Holy Spirit who put you at that hut beside four men who trust you.
Read where He is standing when He says it. He is not in a synagogue. He is reclining at a table in a tax collector's house, at a meal that man had put on, surrounded by the people that man knew, which was a room full of exactly the sort of company that got both of them talked about for months.
He did not book a hall and hope they came. He went to a house, and He ate the food, and He stayed for the evening.
That is the whole method and it is not a method. There is no technique here and there is no number you have to hit and there is nothing to memorize. Two hundred and fifty years ago a man whose entire instinct was decency, order and doing things properly ended up standing on a rise of ground in a field outside Bristol, preaching to coal miners at five in the morning, because those men were never going to walk into a church and he had finally worked out that this was not their failing.
Where they already are. That is the instruction, and it is the whole instruction, and you already know the postcode.
Before the story, take this plainly: you are already standing where He sent people, at half six, in a tea hut. His word says they that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick, and it is the Holy Spirit who put you at that counter beside four men who trust you.
So stop trying to move four men across a city.
You are not being asked to. You never were, and the eighteen months of silence came from an assignment nobody gave you. The room is nine feet by six and it has a kettle in it and you are in it four mornings a week and you have been in it for years, and it is already yours.
Nothing changes about the hut. You do not arrive on Monday with a plan. You do not bring anything in your bag. You do not turn the crossword into an illustration, and if you catch yourself steering a conversation, stop, because those men would smell it in a second and they would be right to.
Here is all of it. Be there, the way you have always been there, and stop editing yourself out.
When Danny asks how the weekend was, tell him the true answer instead of the safe one. When Vic says something hard about his mother, do not change the subject, and do not fix it, and do not quote anything. Say the actual thing that is in you, in your own words, at normal volume, and then pass the biscuits.
That is going where they are. It has no title and nobody will call it ministry and it is exactly what He did at that table.
You are in the right room already and you have been for years. His word says I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you at that hut every morning at half six with the men you actually know.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud before Monday. The standing to speak is yours in Christ and it did not come with a job title or a building, and it is not withdrawn because two men once said yeah maybe. Speak to the shame and to the silence, and bless every man in that hut by name. What God does with it afterwards is His, and He may answer in a way you never see.
- Building, you are good and you are not the boundary of this. Jesus ate in a tax collector's house, and the house is where He chose to do it.
- Cowardice I have been calling politeness, get out in the name of Jesus. I can go where they already are, and the going is not a campaign, it is a kettle.
- God, You went to the table and You are sending me to mine. The tea hut at half six is Your ground, and I am standing on it as Yours.
Mark 2:17
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