There Is No Front In My Living Room

The camera is fixed at the back of the hall, so he watches the whole thing at a slight angle, from about thirty feet behind everybody.

Fourteen months. He has not been in that building since a Wednesday in the spring of last year, and it is unlikely to change quickly, and he has stopped saying so to people because of how they look when he does.

They stream it faithfully. Somebody set it up, somebody checks the sound, and it is not a token effort. He is grateful for it and he says so.

And then, at the end, the invitation is given, and the people in that hall get up and go forward, and he sits in a chair in a room where there is nowhere to go. There is a bookcase and a window. The geography of a response does not exist in a living room, and every week for fourteen months the moment has arrived and passed over him without any way of answering it, and he has watched three hundred people do the thing he cannot do from thirty feet behind them.

He wants to be in that building. Let that be said plainly: this is not a man who has decided he does not need the room. He aches for the room.

What has quietly happened alongside the ache is worse: he has begun to understand himself as a man watching the church rather than a man in it, and the wanting has started to feel like the whole of what he has.

If the invitation comes to you through a screen, pull your chair round. Nothing about that building, or the people in it, is going to be run down here.

Watching and being outside are not the same thing

Let us separate two things that fourteen months have welded together, because the weld is doing the damage rather than the illness.

The first is a real loss. Not being in the room is a genuine deprivation, and the ache is appropriate, and nobody here is going to tell him that a screen is just as good. It is not just as good. That is why he grieves it.

The second is a conclusion he has drawn from the first, and it does not follow from it: that a man watching from outside a room is therefore outside what happens in it. Those are different claims. The first is about a building. The second is about God, and nobody said it to him.

You are not outside what God is doing on Sunday. Nothing about a camera at the back of a hall has ever placed you beyond His reach in your own chair. I am not saying it to console a man who is ill. The written word says at the ninth hour I prayed in my house, and, behold, a man stood before me in bright clothing (Acts 10:30), which is an account of God arriving in a private room with nobody else in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a man thirty feet behind everybody.

The one who was not in the meeting

Here is the part that changed this for me, and it takes nothing off the room he is missing.

Read where Cornelius was, and what he was doing, when the whole thing began.

Four days ago I was fasting until this hour; and at the ninth hour I prayed in my house, and, behold, a man stood before me in bright clothing.Acts 10:30

In my house. He was not in a synagogue, he was not in a congregation, he was not at any gathering at all. He was a man alone in a domestic room at three in the afternoon, praying, and what follows is one of the hinge events of the entire book.

Nothing in the account treats his location as second best. Heaven moves toward the house. Peter is sent to it, and the outcome reaches further than anything that happened in a meeting that week.

You are reachable in a domestic room, and Scripture built a hinge of the whole account around exactly that. That is written into Cornelius's own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a living room fourteen months in.

Nothing here says the building does not matter

Something has to be said very plainly, or this becomes a page that makes peace with something a man should keep aching about.

The room matters. Being with people matters, the invitation given in that hall is good, and the ones who walk forward are not doing something ornamental. His grief at missing it is not a spiritual immaturity to be talked out of. Keep wanting it. Go back the first week you can.

The relief is not that he has stopped needing the building.

You can ask from that chair while you are still aching for the room, and asking there takes nothing off one person walking forward in that hall. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him (Psalm 145:18), where nearness is His position rather than a place a man has to get to, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a postcode, who carries what is asked.

And if these fourteen months have cost more than the friends in that room know, if sleep has gone, if being in the house has begun 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.