The first thing he felt after it happened was joy, and the second thing, about four days later, was dread.
Because he knows how this is supposed to go. He has watched three people he cares about have something like it, and in all three cases there was a season of unsettledness and then a departure, warm enough at the start and awkward by the end, and a gap in a pew where somebody used to sit.
So the pattern arrived in his head as a fact: this means a move. Not a decision he has made. A conclusion he inherited by watching.
And underneath the dread is something simpler and more tired than he would like to admit. He is fifty six. He has moved house four times and jobs twice and buried both parents, and he does not want to start again anywhere. He wants what happened to him and he wants his own pew, and the idea that those two are incompatible is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with theology.
If you have assumed the same thing, come and sit on the step. Nobody who left is being criticized here, and neither is anybody who stayed.
A pattern is not an obligation
Let us look at where the rule came from, because a rule nobody wrote down is the hardest kind to argue with.
Three people had an experience and three people eventually left. That is a real observation and it happened, and there is no point pretending otherwise. But three cases is a pattern in a memory, not a law in Scripture, and a thing observed three times has an enormous head start on a thing never stated once.
Nowhere in the book is a person told that being met by God requires them to relocate. It simply does not appear.
You are not under an instruction to go. Nothing that happened to you carried a relocation clause, and no pattern in your memory has ever been binding on you. I am not saying it to settle you down. The written word says brethren, let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God (1 Corinthians 7:24), where abide is the plain word for staying put and the phrase with God is attached to it rather than to leaving, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a man of fifty six on his own front step.
The verse that keeps saying the same thing
Here is what steadied me, and it is not an argument against anybody's departure.
Paul is writing to people in every conceivable situation and the instruction repeats three times in about twelve verses.
Brethren, let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God.1 Corinthians 7:24
Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called, he says at verse twenty. Then again at twenty four. The whole passage is about people who have been genuinely and dramatically met by God and are now assuming that the meeting requires them to rearrange their entire situation.
His answer is not that changing is forbidden. It is that the meeting itself did not demand it, and a person can stay exactly where they are and be with God there.
You are free to stay, and Scripture says so about people in the middle of exactly your kind of moment. That is written three times over in one passage, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands that in a man who has moved house four times already.
Nothing here is against the ones who went
Something has to be said very plainly, because a page like this could easily turn into a complaint about three people.
They did not do anything wrong. They may well have been led, and it may have been the best decision either of them ever made, and it is not the business of this page or of anybody reading it. There is no verdict here on anybody who left, and none on your own building either.
The claim is narrow and it is about a rule rather than about people.
You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and the pew you have sat in for thirty years is not a thing you owe anybody an explanation for keeping. Scripture says only, as God hath distributed to every man, as the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk (1 Corinthians 7:17), where every man is individual and the distributing is His, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a pattern, who directs a life.
And if this has cost more than anybody around here knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
So here is the turn, and it is not permission to stay handed down by me.
He did this to you here. You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and you do not have to go. The written word says let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God (1 Corinthians 7:24), which is said directly to people in the middle of being met and attaches with God to the staying, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a front step on a warm afternoon.
I cannot tell you what God does next with you or that congregation, and I would not try. Nobody honest would from here. What I can tell you is that the rule you have been obeying was written by three departures and not by Scripture, and that the tiredness you feel about moving is not a spiritual problem.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the right to speak like this is His rather than your own. You speak under His will and not yours, and what God does next about your church, and when, is His to decide, in His own way and in His own time.
- Assumption that this obliges me to move, you are a rule nobody wrote down and you are not what God asked of me. First Corinthians 7 says let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with God, and the Holy Spirit attached the words with God to the staying. In the name of Jesus I take you off my shoulders.
- Dread that arrived four days after the joy, you are not what God says about me and you are not sitting on this step tomorrow. First Corinthians 7 says it three times in twelve verses to people in the middle of exactly this kind of moment, and His Spirit put the repeating there on purpose. I am keeping the pew and keeping what He gave me.
- Father, as You have distributed to every man, as You have called every one, so let him walk, and First Corinthians 7 makes that individual rather than patterned. I thank You that Your Spirit directs a life and that three departures never once became a policy. He did this to me here, and here is the seat I am sitting in.
1 Corinthians 7:24
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