Looking At Other Churches At Night

He does it at about eleven, when the house has gone quiet, and he closes the tab before he goes up.

Service times. A photograph of a room. Somebody's page about what they believe, read twice, looking for a particular kind of sentence. He is not going anywhere. He has not contacted anybody, he has not visited, and he would be mortified if a single person in his own congregation knew he had spent two years doing this.

It started after the thing happened to him, and the two are obviously connected, and he has never once let himself put them in the same sentence.

What he tells himself is that he is just reading. What he suspects is that he is a man with something in his hands looking for a shelf, and that the looking is a slow way of leaving without ever having decided to.

And underneath both of those is the part with the shame in it: that if he is doing this, then the twenty six years he has already given that place must have been a kind of mistake.

If you have been reading other people's service times in the dark, come and sit on the sand. Nothing you have been doing is going to be called disloyalty here.

Looking is a hunger, not a treachery

Let us describe the eleven o'clock accurately, because two years of calling it something worse has done its own damage.

A man who has been given something and has nowhere to put it will look for somewhere to put it. That is not disloyalty, it is what hands do. It is the same motion as a person carrying a heavy box through a house checking each room, and nobody would call that an insult to the hallway.

The shame arrived later and it arrived from a different direction entirely: from the idea that wanting a shelf implies a complaint about the house.

You are not betraying anybody by being hungry. Nothing about a browser open at eleven has ever been a verdict on twenty six years. I am not saying it to excuse anything. The written word says as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God (Psalm 42:1), which puts the hunger inside the psalter as a healthy thing rather than a disloyal one, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a dark kitchen with a laptop on.

The place He could not be absent from

Here is what steadied me, and it is not an argument for staying put.

The psalmist runs an experiment. He tries to find a location outside God's presence, and he is thorough about it, and he cannot do it.

If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.Psalm 139:8

He goes to both extremes available to his imagination and God is at both. Then he tries distance, the uttermost parts of the sea, and the answer is a hand already leading him there. Then he tries darkness, and the darkness turns out not to work as a covering.

The search fails at every attempt, and the psalm was written down and sung as a comfort rather than as a defeat.

You cannot get to a room He is not in, and Scripture has a man proving it by trying. That is written as a completed search, and the Holy Spirit brings it to bear on a man reading a map at eleven at night.

This page will not tell you what to do about it

Something must be said very plainly, because everything in a piece like this leans toward an instruction.

Nothing here says close the laptop and stay, and nothing here says go and visit. This page does not know your church, your marriage, your children, your history in that building, or one single thing about the room you have been reading about. A real person acts on what a page says, and neither the written word nor the Holy Spirit has handed me a sentence in either direction to pass on.

What is being said is one thing and it concerns only what you are already holding.

You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and that remains true whatever you eventually decide about anything. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence (Psalm 139:7), which is a question with no available answer in any direction, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a decision about a building, who makes that live in a man tonight.

And if these two years have cost more than anybody on this shore 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.