I Went Up Once, Twenty Years Ago

He was twenty six, and he went up for one thing, and something else entirely got prayed over him.

It was not malice. He wants that said first, because it is true. The man praying was kind, and busy, and had about forty people to get through, and he made an assumption from what he could see. So he prayed loudly, with his hand on this young man's shoulder, about a thing that was not the young man's situation at all, in front of a section of a room that included two of his cousins and the woman he was going to marry.

Everybody was gracious. Nobody laughed. His cousins never mentioned it, then or since, which in his family is its own kind of comment.

He said amen, and he walked back, and he sat down, and in twenty years he has not been out of his seat once.

He could not tell you when the decision got made, because it never got made. There was simply never an occasion when it seemed worth it, and after enough of those in a row, not going is not a decision anymore, it is just what he does.

If your one time went sideways, come and lean on the gate. The man who prayed for you is not going to be criticized here.

Four minutes did not set the terms

Let us look at what those four minutes actually established, because twenty years is a long time to run on a conclusion nobody ever wrote down.

They established that a kind man with forty people to see made a wrong guess. That is all they established. It is a fact about a Tuesday evening and about the limits of what anybody can tell from a face.

What it turned into is much larger: a standing arrangement in which the front is a place where a man gets read wrong in public, and so the front is closed. And a closed front, over twenty years, quietly becomes a closed everything, because he never found another way to ask.

You were not misjudged by God that night. Nothing a tired man guessed wrong about you has ever been on His record of you. I am not saying that to smooth it over. The written word says a bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench (Isaiah 42:3), which is a description of how He handles the already damaged, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man at a gate twenty years later.

What He does with the ones already bent

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off the man who prayed.

Read what that verse promises, because it is not comfort in general. It is specific about the condition a person is in when He gets to them.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.Isaiah 42:3

Bruised already. Smoking already, which is what flax does when it is nearly out. He is not described as arriving to a person in good order. The whole line assumes damage is already there and states what He will not do with it.

He will not finish it off. And then, in the same breath, He shall bring forth judgment unto truth, which means the wrong reading gets corrected rather than left standing.

You are handled gently by the one who knows exactly what happened, and Scripture puts His care and the correcting in a single sentence. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man who has sat still for two decades.

Nothing here is against that man or that invitation

Something has to be said very plainly, or this becomes a quiet case against a servant who was doing his best on a long night.

He was praying for forty people. He guessed, because a person praying for forty people has to guess, and he guessed wrong once. That is not a scandal, it is Tuesday. And the invitation itself has been the door for a great many people in that building, and if you can go up, go up, and this page will not put one obstacle in front of you.

The relief is not that the front is a risk to be avoided.

You can ask from where you are, and asking from there takes nothing off the invitation or off one person who answers it. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth (Psalm 145:18), where the qualifier is truth and not location, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a walk down an aisle, who carries what a man asks.

And if these twenty years have cost more than the people at that gate know, if sleep has gone, if Sunday has started to sit heavy on you, 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 going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.