It Happened In A Very Quiet Service

There were nineteen people in and the loudest thing in the building was the radiator.

That is the detail she keeps returning to, because it makes the whole thing harder to place. It was a said service, not a sung one. No instruments. A short reading, some silence that the tradition builds in on purpose, and a hymn at the end that nobody could really carry.

And in the silence, something came.

She has no complaint about how it arrived. It suited her, and the room suited her, and she has been going to that particular service for eleven years precisely because it is quiet and she is a person for whom quiet is not an absence.

The trouble started about a fortnight later, and it started as a fear rather than a thought. It went like this: if this is what people mean by the thing they talk about, then keeping it will mean going somewhere it is talked about, and the rooms where it is talked about are loud, and she would sooner not.

So she has been holding a real gift at arm's length in case accepting it comes with a relocation to a room she would find unbearable.

If you have been braced for that, come and sit down. Nobody's Sunday morning is going to be ranked on this page.

The gift did not arrive with a venue attached

Let us look at the fear directly, because a fortnight of bracing has built it into something structural.

It assumes that God's gifts come with an implied setting, and that receiving one commits a person to the kind of room where that gift is usually discussed. Put like that it sounds odd, and it is odd, and it has never been said out loud in eleven years.

But it does not survive being looked at. What arrived in the silence arrived in the silence. There was no clause.

You are not committed to any room by having been given something. Nothing came with a condition attached about where you would have to take it. I am not saying that to relax you. The written word says now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:4), where the variety is on the side of what is given and the constancy is the Giver's, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a said service with nineteen people in.

The verse that puts Him after the noise

Here is what steadied me, and it is not an argument against loud rooms.

A prophet has just seen fire fall in front of a nation. Then he runs, and collapses, and God comes to him at a cave, and the text is unusually careful about the order.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.1 Kings 19:12

Wind, earthquake, fire. Three enormous events, and the account says plainly He was not in any of them. Then a still small voice, and the man wraps his face in his mantle, because he knows exactly who is speaking.

Notice that this is written about a man who had just been present at one of the loudest things in the Old Testament and had been entirely at home in it. The passage is not against noise. It simply refuses to make noise the address.

You were met in a quiet room by the God who is not confined to the loud one, and Scripture is deliberate about that order. That is written into the sequence itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands that in a woman eleven years into a said service.

Nothing here says quiet is better

Something must be said very plainly, or this page becomes exactly the kind of ranking it is trying to remove.

The rooms with the bands in them are not inferior. God is in them, people are met in them, and this article has nothing critical to say about a single one. The relief on offer here is not that your kind of service wins.

The relief is that there was never a competition and never a transfer.

You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and the quiet you were met in is neither a lesser setting nor a superior one. Scripture says all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will (1 Corinthians 12:11), where severally means one at a time and as he will puts the choosing entirely on His side, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a style, who decides where and how.

And if this fortnight has cost more than anybody around you knows, if sleep has gone, if the Sundays 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.