You Are Not Faking It

The hall smells of coffee and floor polish and the radiator that only works in the second week of every month.

It is twenty past nine and the meeting has been over for a while, but it has not really ended, the way these things never really end. Down at the front there are maybe fifteen people still standing in a loose knot. A woman with her face in her hands. A young lad on his knees with somebody's arm around his shoulders. Somebody laughing and crying at the same time, which he has never understood and has stopped pretending to.

He is at the back. He has a stack of six chairs balanced against his hip and he is walking them to the trolley, because doing that means he is a man with a job rather than a man standing on his own.

He was here the whole time. He sang the words. He did not check his phone once. When they asked people to close their eyes he closed his eyes, and he waited, the way he has waited for nineteen years, and what came was: the radiator ticking, somebody's chair leg scraping, and the thought that he must remember to move the car before eight.

Nothing else. Not a flicker. Not once.

He stacks the chairs. He wipes the two mugs somebody left on the windowsill. On the way out somebody says, wasn't that something, and he says, yeah, it really was, and he means it, because it clearly was something, for them.

In the car park he sits with the engine off for a minute and does the sum he does about four times a year, which goes: if this were true in me, would I not have felt it by now.

And now I am going to stop saying he.

Because that is your back row. That is your stack of chairs. You are the one who is always fine, always there, always helping with the tables, and inside you is a small cold suspicion you have never said out loud to anybody in your life: that everyone else got something you did not get, and you have been doing a very good impression of a Christian since you were about nineteen.

You do not doubt God. That is not it. You doubt yourself. You watch people be undone in a room and you feel like a man watching a language he cannot speak, nodding along in case somebody asks him a question.

And the worst of it is not the emptiness. It is the word that shows up with it. Fake.

Stay there. Do not put the chairs down yet. I want you to hear something, and it is not an argument.

The knowing is not on your side of the room

I could make you a case. I am a teacher, so I could build you a very tidy one about temperament and about how feeling and faith are not the same instrument, and you would nod at it in the car park and it would be gone by Thursday.

I am not going to do that, because a case is exactly what has been failing you. You have already argued yourself into it and argued yourself out of it about forty times, and the arguing is the treadmill, not the way off.

So let me say the honest, heavy part first. There is a real grief in this. Not a theological problem. A grief. You have sat in rooms for two decades where other people are visibly met, and you have gone home and put the kettle on and been happy for them and lonely at the same time, and nobody has ever once noticed that you were lonely, because you were carrying the chairs. Scripture never once treats a dry season as a verdict on a person, and the Spirit has been sitting in that grief beside you rather than waiting for you to get over it.

Now here is what I actually want you to see. Look at where Paul puts the weight.

But the solid foundation of God stands, having this seal: "The Lord knows those who are His," and "Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from wrongdoing."2 Timothy 2:19

Read the seal. Read who is doing the verb.

It does not say, those who are His know it. It does not say, those who are His feel it. It does not say, the ones who cried at the front are the ones on the foundation. It says: the Lord knows those who are His.

The knowing sits on His side of the room. It always did.

And Paul wrote that to a young man in a church coming apart, where people were anxious about who was really in and who was not, and he did not hand them a checklist. He handed them the fact that God is not confused about His own. God has never once looked at you across a hall and had to work out whether you belonged to Him.

Sit with that for a second, because it is not an argument, it is a look.

He has seen every one of those nineteen years. He saw the closed eyes and the radiator ticking. He saw you wait, and wait, and get nothing, and come back the next week and wait again. Do you know what that is, from where He is sitting? That is nineteen years of a man showing up for a God who did not give him a single thing to show for it. Nobody does that for a fake.

You have been reading your dryness as evidence against you. He has been reading it, all this time, as the most stubborn love in the building. The seal in 2 Timothy 2:19 was set by Him and never by you, and His Spirit has been standing in that hall through every dry week of the nineteen years.