The Room You Cannot Walk Into Any More

Ten to seven, and the car has been switched off for eleven minutes.

He can see the hall from where he is parked. Two windows, yellow, steamed at the corners, and somebody has propped the fire door open with a folding chair so the heat can get out. Through the propped door comes the sound. Not words. Just the sound forty people make when they all talk at once, that low roll with the laughter riding on top of it, and every time it swells his hands go colder on the wheel.

His hand is on the door handle. It has been on the door handle for a while now. He is not pulling it.

Inside there is a table with a cloth on it and somebody's aunt has made too much food, and there are people in that room who love him. That is the part he cannot get anyone to understand. It is not a room full of enemies. It is a room full of his own people, and there is a chair in there with his name on a folded card, and he cannot make his arm work.

He was fine at these. That is the cruelty of it. Three years ago he was the one who arrived early and stayed late and carried the chairs back out to the van at the end. He knows what he used to be like in there. He can picture it the way you picture a stranger.

Now his ears are roaring. That is the only way he has found to say it. A pressure behind the jaw, a sound like a motorway inside his own head, and under his ribs a lift that has nothing to do with the room and everything to do with a body that has decided, without consulting him, that this is a cliff edge.

The phone is on his knee. The text is already typed. So sorry, something came up at work, give everyone my love. His thumb is over the arrow. He has written that text before, at a different door, in a different month, and he swore afterwards that he would not do it again.

He sends it.

Then he sits in a dark car park with the engine off, and the relief lasts about ninety seconds, and then it turns into the other thing, the thing that is worse than the roaring, and he puts both hands over his face in a cold car outside a room where people were saving him a seat.

You have sat in that car.

Maybe yours is a corridor outside a staff room, or the top of a driveway, or the porch of a building where you got as far as the second set of doors and turned round and walked back to the pavement like a man who had forgotten something. You have the same drafted text with the same reasonable lie in it. You have the same list of rooms that used to be nothing, getting shorter, quietly, without a single announcement.

And you have the thing you have not said out loud to anybody, which is not that you are afraid of the room.

It is that you think there is something wrong with you.

Your body is not accusing you

Let me get one thing off you before anything else, because you have been carrying it up and down that car park and it is not yours.

What is happening in your body is not a report on your faith. It never was. Your ears roaring is not God grading you. That alarm is a piece of equipment that was built into you on purpose, older than language, and it does exactly one job: it goes off when it thinks you are in danger. It is very fast and it is not very clever. It cannot tell the difference between a threat and a room that once held one, and it is working from information it collected a long time ago and has never been asked to update. God has never once read that alarm as a verdict on you. Nowhere in Scripture is a steady pulse the price of His company, and His Spirit is in the car with the roaring rather than outside it waiting for quiet.

That is all. A smoke alarm going off over burnt toast is not a lie about the house. It is a smoke alarm doing precisely what a smoke alarm does.

So we will not be treating your nervous system as a spiritual verdict, and I would like you to stop doing it too, starting now.

Now hear where the fear actually costs you something, because I said I would not shrink it.

It is not the evening you missed. It is the shrinking. It is that the list of rooms keeps getting shorter and nobody sees it happening except you, and every time it shortens you lose a little more of the argument for yourself. It is standing in a car park at ten past seven and knowing that people in there are saying he must be busy, and knowing what you actually are, and having no way to explain it that does not sound either dramatic or pathetic.

That is a real grief. I am not going to call it small so that it is easier for me to answer.

Now listen to the man who wrote this line, and listen to what he does not say.

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?Psalm 27:1

He does not say he feels no fear. Read the rest of that psalm sometime and you will find the same man, in the same song, asking God not to hide His face from him and not to forsake him, which is not the vocabulary of a man with a settled stomach. He is afraid and he is declaring. Both, at once, in one psalm, and nobody edited it out.

That should be an enormous relief to you, because you have been told somewhere along the way that faith is the absence of the roaring. It is not. Faith is what you say while the roaring is going on. Psalm 27 was written by a man whose voice was not steady. It takes His Spirit to put a declaration into a mouth that has not settled yet.

And look at the first word he reaches for. Light. Not a shield, not a weapon, not a strategy. Light.

Light has one behavior and it is worth watching. It does not negotiate with the dark. It does not build up its courage in the doorway. It arrives, and where it arrives, that is simply the end of the dark in that place, without a single argument having been had.

Here is the part I want you to hold. He is not waiting for you inside that hall to see whether you make it. He is the light in there and He is the light in this car. He got to both places before you did.