It Happens Where You Are Sitting

Eleven years in the same row, four back on the left, and she has never once been to the front.

It did not start as a decision. The first few times she was new and did not know whether she was allowed. Then she was not new, and going up would have been a thing people noticed, and there was always a reason that particular week.

After enough weeks the reasons stopped being needed. Not going became simply what she does, and somewhere along the way it hardened into something she believes.

What she believes, and has never said, is this: that whatever God is doing on a Thursday evening happens at the front, in the space between the first row and the platform, and that the people who get up and walk into that space are inside the thing and the people in the rows are the audience for it.

So she sits in the audience, and she wants something, and she has wanted it for a long time, and she has never once asked for it in that building.

If you have been in the same row for years, sit down and stay sitting. Nothing about that front, or one person who has walked to it, is going to be run down here.

A geography she was never taught

Let us name what she has built, because nobody handed it to her and eleven years is long enough for a private conclusion to feel like doctrine.

She has drawn a map of that room in which there is an inside and an outside, and the border runs along the front row. That map is not in anything anybody has said from the platform, it is not in the bulletin, and if she described it out loud to the man who leads that evening he would be genuinely distressed.

It came from watching. Things visibly happen in one part of the room, so that is where the things are, and everywhere else is where the watching is done.

You are not in the audience. Nothing about eleven years in the fourth row has ever put you outside what God is doing in that hall. I am not saying it to be encouraging. The written word says suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting (Acts 2:2), which is precise about the location and about the posture, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a woman four rows back.

It filled all the house where they were sitting

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one person who has ever gone forward.

Read the two details in that verse that nobody quotes, because they are exactly the two she needs.

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.Acts 2:2

All the house. Not the front of it. There is no part of that room described as the place where it happened, and no part described as where it did not, and the verse goes out of its way to say all.

And where they were sitting. That is their posture at the moment it arrived. Nobody in that account had assembled at a front, and nobody was standing in a designated space, and the sound did not require them to move first in order to reach them.

You are inside the house it fills, and Scripture puts the whole room and a seated posture in the same sentence. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it to a woman in the fourth row eleven years on.

Nothing here is against the front

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page that quietly runs down an invitation given by people who love God.

The front is not theater. The people who walk into that space are not performing, it costs several of them something to do it, and God meets people there because God meets people. The man who gives that invitation is not building an inner circle, and he would be the first to say so.

And nothing here tells her not to go. If a Thursday comes when she wants to walk up, she should walk up, and this page will not put one thing in her way.

This is for the people in the seats. You do not have to get to the front to be met. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him (Psalm 145:18), where nearness is stated as His position rather than as a distance a person closes, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the layout of a hall, who carries what anybody asks.

And if these eleven years have cost more than the friends in that hall know, if sleep has gone, if Thursday has started to weigh 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 a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.