The Only One In There From Outside

Nobody in his family has ever been to a church for anything except a funeral, and everybody in that room knows it.

Not because he announced it. Because he was asked, on his second visit, in a friendly way, how he had come to be there, and he told the truth, and it is a good story and it is the kind of story people repeat.

He has heard his own account come back to him, secondhand, at least four times now. It has improved slightly each time.

He does not mind. They are not making fun of him and there is no malice anywhere in that room. But there is a thing that happens now: when somebody in that congregation is talking about whether any of this still reaches people who did not grow up in it, they glance at him, and sometimes they gesture at him, and once somebody said his name in a sentence beginning with the words look at.

So he has become evidence. And a man who is evidence cannot have an ordinary week. If he is dry for a month, that is not a dry month, it is data. If he has a doubt, the doubt is not his, it belongs to an argument about whether the thing travels.

Two years of that, and what came to him has quietly become a case he is making rather than a thing he was given.

If you are the only one in there from outside, come and sit on the sand. Nobody who ever repeated your story is being criticized here.

Being evidence is a job with no days off

Let us name the specific cost, because it is not unkindness and it is not exclusion and it is easy to miss.

Nobody in that room has treated him badly. He is liked, he is included, and the interest in his story is genuinely warm. What has happened is smaller and heavier: he has been assigned a meaning, and a person carrying a meaning cannot afford an ordinary interior.

Everybody else in that congregation gets to have a flat week. A flat week for him is a data point in somebody else's argument, and so he manages his own condition the way a man manages a shop window.

You are not an exhibit. Nothing about being the only one from outside has ever made your inner weather anybody's evidence. I am not saying that to make a man feel included. Scripture says of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), which was said in a room where a category had just stopped mattering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man on a beach two years in.

The sentence that dissolved a category

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one person in that congregation.

Read where Peter is standing when he says it, because the setting is the whole force of the line.

Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.Acts 10:34

He is standing in a house he had been taught not to enter, in front of people he had been taught were a different category, and what he says is not that the category has been generously widened. He says God does not work by category at all.

Which cuts both ways, and the second way is the one that matters here. If God is no respecter of persons, then an outsider is not a special case in either direction: not excluded, and not exhibited. Just a man, in a room, being dealt with directly.

You are not a special case in either direction, and Scripture removes the category rather than making an exception inside it. That is written into the sentence itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man who has heard his own story told back to him four times.

Nobody who repeated your story is being blamed

Something must be said plainly, or this becomes a page about people whose only fault is delight.

They repeat it because they are glad. A congregation that has watched something go quiet for a long time hears an account like his and takes real heart from it, and that is not using him, it is hope doing what hope does. The man who said look at was not exhibiting a specimen. He was encouraged and it came out clumsily, as encouragement often does.

And nothing here is against the way that room worships either. What is expressive there is not for show, and the reserved among them are not further along than the demonstrative.

What He gave you is not a demonstration. You have nothing to prove in that room. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where every man is a category that includes and dissolves his, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not one man's dry month, who settles whether anything still reaches anybody.

And if these two years have cost more than the people on that sand know, if sleep has gone, if walking in has started to frighten 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.