Four Is Not Avoidance

It was said kindly. She has to keep reminding herself of that, five months on, because kindly is the only thing keeping it from being a fight.

They were in a car park. The woman is somebody she likes and who has never been anything but good to her, and it came out at the end of a conversation about something else, in that particular voice people use when they have been meaning to say a thing for a while.

She said: I do wonder whether the small group is a bit of avoidance, love.

And she said: mm. Possibly.

That is what she said. Mm, possibly, and then something about the traffic, and then she drove home and thought of eleven things and has thought of about forty since.

Here is the situation, plainly.

She meets with three other people. They have done it for four years. It is a Tuesday, it is somebody's front room, there is a blanket that lives on the arm of the chair and belongs to nobody, and they read a bit and talk about it and pray at the end and it goes on about ninety minutes.

She also goes on a Sunday, most weeks, to a building with about two hundred people in it. She stands, she sings, she leaves at the end, and she is not present for one minute of it in the way she is present on a Tuesday.

And the thing she could not say in the car park is that the Tuesday is not what she does instead of the Sunday. The Tuesday is where the whole of it happens for her, and it has been for four years, and she has quietly assumed the whole time that this was a deficiency she was managing rather than a life she was living.

He was not in the wind, and the text says so as a fact

Sit down under the blanket a minute, because there is a passage about a man in a very bad state on a mountain, and what happens to him is described with unusual precision.

There is a great and strong wind that broke the rocks in pieces. There is an earthquake. There is a fire.

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

The Lord was not in the fire.

Notice how that is written. It is not a preference. Nobody says the fire was bad, or vulgar, or a lesser form of thing, and nowhere in the chapter is anybody criticized for expecting God in the earthquake, which is a completely reasonable thing to expect.

It is reported as a fact about where He was on that day, on that mountain, with that man.

And then a still small voice. The Hebrew is stranger than the English: a sound of thin silence, or a voice of fine stillness, and it is the thing Elijah wraps his face for.

Hear this in your own front room. You are not managing a deficiency, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the Lord in the thin silence on the day that man needed to hear Him and reports it plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in a room of four on a Tuesday for four years.

Now let me take the word apart, because it has been sitting in you since the car park and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassurance.

Avoidance is real. It exists, and there are people for whom a small room genuinely is a place to hide from something, and the woman who said it was not inventing a category.

Here is the test, and it is the only one that works, and it is the one the written word uses when it looks at a room, with the Holy Spirit as the one doing the enlarging. Avoidance shrinks. A thing you are hiding in gets smaller over time: fewer people, fewer subjects, less honesty, and a growing list of things that cannot be said in it.

Now look at your Tuesday over four years. More honest than it was, not less. Harder things said in it, not fewer. It has held a bereavement and somebody's marriage and a diagnosis, and all four of you know things about each other that nobody at the two hundred knows about any of you.

That is not the shape of a hiding place. That is the shape of a room where people are known.

Hear this too, and let it stop the forty things. You are not required to defend it, and Scripture is what says so. What is written records the thin silence without one word against the wind, and the Spirit of God does not have a minimum room size and has never once told anybody that quiet is a symptom.

And let me be plain about the two hundred, because this site will not do the other thing. That building is not a machine and those people are not shallow. She is right that Sunday matters and you would not disagree with her. The two are not in competition, and the only thing being corrected here is the idea that one of them is the real thing and the other is your coping strategy.