No Word For It In This Building

It happened during the last hymn and it lasted about forty seconds.

She could not tell you what to call it. That is the honest beginning and it is also the whole problem. Something came, and it was not emotion, because she has been moved by music her whole life and knows exactly what that feels like from the inside. This was different in a way she has never been able to describe to anybody, including herself.

Then the organ finished and everybody put their books down and the notices happened, and she stood there holding something that had no name in that room.

She has been back every Sunday since. Fourteen weeks. Nobody has mentioned it because nobody saw anything, and she has not raised it, because the sentence she would have to start with does not exist in the vocabulary of that building.

And here is what the silence has slowly done. It has begun to work backward on the event itself, so that a thing which was unmistakable in May is now something she is not quite sure about in August.

If your church has no word for what happened to you, sit down and have some coffee. Nothing about your building is going to be criticized here.

A gap in a vocabulary is not a verdict

Let us name the mechanism, because it has been running unexamined for fourteen weeks.

A room's language is a record of what that room has had occasion to talk about. It is not a list of what God is permitted to do there. Every tradition has words for the things it has handled often and nothing at all for the things it has handled rarely, and the absence of a term is a fact about a vocabulary rather than a fact about heaven.

Nobody in that building decided against your forty seconds. There was simply no shelf, and a thing with no shelf gets carried about.

You are not holding something that God has to be defended over. What arrived in the last hymn arrived from Him, and no room's shortage of words has ever reached back and unmade it. I am not saying that to be kind to you. The written word says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where every is doing the work and no building is exempted from it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a woman standing through the notices with something in her hands.

What Scripture says about where He does this

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not an argument about anybody's church.

Look at the places in the book where God moves on somebody, and notice how ordinary and how unprepared most of them are.

But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.1 Corinthians 12:7

A man threshing wheat in a winepress. A woman drawing water at the wrong hour. Men in an upstairs room who were only there because they had been told to wait. A Roman soldier in his own house, mid sentence, before anybody had finished speaking.

Not one of those is a venue chosen for its suitability. God moved where the person already was, in the room they were already standing in, doing what they were already doing.

You were met where you were sitting, and Scripture has Him doing that continually rather than exceptionally. That is written into account after account, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a fourth pew on a Sunday in May.

Nothing here is telling you to go

Something has to be said very plainly, because a page on this subject usually has an instruction hidden in it somewhere.

Nobody here knows your situation. This article will not tell you to leave that church and it will not tell you to stay, because a real person acts on what a page like this says, and neither of those decisions belongs to somebody who has never met you.

What is being said is one thing only: what happened is real, and it happened there.

You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and the fact that you have no word for it is not a reason to look for a different room. Scripture says that God hath set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him (1 Corinthians 12:18), where set is a deliberate act and the placing is His, and the Holy Spirit holds that steady over a woman who has begun looking at other buildings online at night.

And if the fourteen weeks have 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.