Waiting For It To Become Something

Five chairs, out at quarter past six, for three years.

She started it. Nobody asked her to and nobody appointed her, and it grew out of two women who were struggling and a room at the back that was not being used on a Wednesday.

Three years. It has been between four and seven the whole time. Mostly five.

She is good at it. She is better at it than she was, which is what three years does, and there are things that happen in that room that she could not have produced at the start and does not produce now.

Here is the sentence, and she caught it in June and it has not gone away.

She was setting the chairs out and she thought: this is taking longer than I expected.

And she stopped, with a chair in each hand, because she heard what was in it.

Taking longer than I expected. Which means there has been an expectation running, the whole time, in the background, that this was going somewhere else. That five was a stage. That at some point it becomes the thing it is supposed to be, which in her head has about twenty five people in it and a second room and somebody helping with the teaching.

She has never once articulated that picture. It has never been on paper and she has never described it to another human being.

It has been the standard she has quietly measured three years against, and it has never been reached, and she has therefore been slightly disappointed at the end of about a hundred and fifty Wednesdays without ever knowing why.

Many were gathered together praying, in a house

Sit down in one of those five chairs a minute, because there is a single verse in Acts that tells you where the church actually was on the most decisive night of that chapter.

Peter is in prison. He is chained between two soldiers and the execution is scheduled and the church is doing the only thing available to it.

An angel gets him out. He walks through the city, still half convinced he is seeing things, and then Luke tells us where he went.

And when he had considered the thing, he came to the house of Mary the mother of John, whose surname was Mark; where many were gathered together praying.Acts 12:12

A house. People gathered together praying in it.

That is the church at the center of the most dramatic night in Acts 12, and it is a room in somebody's home with an unspecified number of people in it and a servant girl who answers the door and gets told she is mad.

Nobody in that room was waiting for it to become something. They were praying, in a house, on a Thursday of their own, and the answer to their prayer was standing outside knocking while they argued about whether Rhoda had lost her mind.

Hear this with the chairs in your hands. You are not running a stage, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the praying church in a house on the night everything turned, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in a back room at quarter past six on a hundred and fifty Wednesdays.

Now let me name the picture, because you have never described it to anybody and it has been running you for three years.

Twenty five people. A second room. Somebody helping with the teaching.

It is not a bad picture. There is nothing wrong with any element of it and if it arrived tomorrow you would handle it well. That is not the problem.

The problem is that an unarticulated standard cannot be met and cannot be revised. It just sits there, and every Wednesday is measured against it, silently, and comes up short, and you never see the measurement happen. You only feel the result, which is a small flat disappointment at ten past nine that you have never had a reason for.

Hear this too, and let the picture come down. You are not behind, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the whole praying church in one house without one word about what it was going to become, and the Spirit of God has never handed anybody a room and then privately compared it to a bigger one.

And this is worth being plain about, because this site does not do the other thing. If it becomes twenty five, that would be good. If a second room opens and somebody comes to help with the teaching, that would be good, and none of it would be a promotion. And a church of twelve hundred down the road is not further along than your back room. There is no ladder here, which is exactly why a picture at the top of one has been costing you a hundred and fifty Wednesdays.