They Look At Me When Somebody Is Ill

There is a moment in every meeting now, and it lasts about two seconds, and he has learned to see it coming.

Somebody mentions an illness. There is a small pause while the room decides what to do with it. And then, without anybody planning it or meaning anything unkind by it, about eleven heads turn a few degrees in his direction.

It comes from one evening four years ago. He prayed for a woman, and she got better, and he could not tell you what the sequence of that was and has never claimed to. He has said, every single time it has been raised, that he does not know what happened, that she had good doctors and a great many people praying, and that he was one man in a room.

Nobody hears that part. What the room retained was the shape of the story, and the shape has him in the middle of it.

So now he arrives on Thursdays braced. He has begun to notice himself deciding, on the way in, whether tonight is a night he will be up to it, as though there were a performance scheduled that somebody had put him down for.

And underneath that is the thing he has said to nobody: that what he actually has, whatever it is, has stopped feeling like something he received and started feeling like a service he provides.

If a room turns and looks at you, come and sit down under the vines. Nobody who ever looked at you is going to be criticized here.

An expectation he never agreed to

Let us look at the arrangement, because it was never negotiated and both sides have been keeping it for four years.

The room has an expectation. He has an obligation. Neither was ever stated out loud, neither has ever been reviewed, and it rests entirely on one evening in which, by his own honest account, he cannot say what happened.

That is a great deal of weight resting on a foundation he himself would not testify to. And the weight is doing something specific to him: it has moved what he carries out of the category of gift and into the category of duty, and a duty has to be discharged, and a thing that has to be discharged gets performed.

You are not the one who does it. Nothing that happened four years ago has ever made you responsible for what a room hopes for tonight. I am not saying it to get a man out of praying for people. Scripture says why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk (Acts 3:12), which is a man refusing exactly this transfer while the crowd is still looking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a man walking into a Thursday.

Peter refuses the middle of the story

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody in that room.

Read what Peter does in the first sentence he speaks after a public healing, because he does not wait and he does not soften it.

Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this? or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk?Acts 3:12

Our own power or holiness. He names both of the things a watching room silently attributes: capability, and standing with God. And he refuses both in the same breath, immediately, before anything else can be built on him.

He does not deny that something happened. The man is standing there. What he denies is that he is the reason, and he does it while the attention is at its highest, which is the only moment at which a refusal like that actually works.

You may hand the attention back, and Scripture has a man do exactly that in his first sentence. That is written into the account itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man who has been bracing on the way in.

Nobody in that room is being blamed

Something must be said plainly, or this becomes a page about eleven people whose only crime is hope.

They are not putting him on a pedestal to be cruel. They are frightened for somebody they love and they are reaching for the nearest thing that has ever seemed to work, and that is not superstition, it is what people do. The two second pause is not a judgment on him. It is fear looking for somewhere to go.

And nothing here says a word against the way that room prays, or against anybody expressive in it. What is demonstrative there is not showing off, and holding still is not a higher form of anything.

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 the giving is spread across everybody rather than concentrated in one man, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the man eleven heads turn toward, who decides what happens on a Thursday.

And if these four years have cost more than the people at that table know, if sleep has gone, if Thursday 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.