The Room Did Not Go Quiet

She has practiced the walk in about two hundred times, and in every single rehearsal the room goes quiet.

That is the detail that never changes. She varies everything else. Sometimes she comes in during the singing, sometimes at the very end, sometimes on a Wednesday when it is only twenty people and the chairs are in a circle. Sometimes she has a speech and sometimes she has nothing. But in all two hundred versions, at the moment the door opens, the sound drops out of the room like somebody pulled a lead.

And then the faces turn. Not angry. That is not what she is afraid of. Careful. Every face doing that small adjustment people do when they have to decide, in a quarter of a second, what expression to put on.

She has run this so many times that it has stopped being a fear and become a memory. Which is the strange thing about a rehearsed scene: after enough repetitions the body cannot tell it never happened.

Here is what is actually going on in that building on a Wednesday.

The chairs are in a circle and one of them is broken and everybody knows which one. A man is telling somebody about his knee, at length. Two women are trying to work out whose casserole dish is whose from three weeks ago. A child is going round the outside of the circle at speed, and a grandmother is following that child at a very different speed. Somebody starts singing before anyone is ready and half the room joins in late and laughing.

Now open the door.

Nothing stops. That is the truth of it and it is almost disappointing. The knee conversation carries on. The dishes stay unresolved. Somebody looks up, says her name in an ordinary voice, and moves a bag off a chair. That is the whole event. The re-entry she has been staging for two years is, in the room where it actually happens, about four seconds long and not the most interesting thing occurring at that moment.

That is you at the door.

You've written a scene, cast it, lit it, and played it to yourself so often that you can hear the hush before you get out of the car. And that hush has never once been recorded by anybody who was in the room. It exists in one place only, and you have been living under it for two years.

Listen to what God is actually doing in that room

I am not going to spend long telling you the hush is imaginary, because you've known that for a while and knowing it has not moved you an inch. What I want you to have is the sound that is actually in the room, because you cannot evict a sound with silence. You evict it with a louder one.

Zephaniah has been carrying hard words for two and a half chapters. Then this arrives.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Singing. God, singing, over the person coming back. That is not a hush. That is the opposite of a hush, and it is in the middle of the room, which is where the verse puts Him: in the midst of thee.

You are walked toward by a God who is already making noise about you, and that noise started before your hand touched the door. That is not me raising the temperature: Zephaniah 3:17 says singing, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my volume who can put that in a chest that has been braced for a hush for two years.

Now, my tradition has a habit that I love and that is easily misunderstood, so let me name it plainly. When somebody comes back in one of my rooms, we make a sound. We do not do a quiet, sober, dignified nod. And the reason is not that we are excitable. The reason is that a hush is what shame sounds like, and we have found that shame cannot hold its ground in a room that is making a noise about somebody's return.

Watch the middle clause too, because it is the one nobody quotes. He will rest in his love. Rest. He is not agitated about you. He is not pacing. He is settled, He is satisfied, and out of that settlement comes the singing.

You have not walked into a deliberation, and nobody in the middle of that room is deciding what expression to use, which is written into the verse and not into my affection for you, with the Spirit of God able to make it real in a body that has rehearsed the alternative two hundred times.

And here is what that does to your two years. It does not make them nothing. It makes them a period in which a scene was playing in one head and a song was going on everywhere else.

This is yours right now, at the door, with your hand not yet on it. Scripture is what settles it and not my enthusiasm, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it the last few feet so it arrives as something to walk on rather than something to admire.

So walk in on the singing. It has been going the whole time.