They Refurbished The Room It Happened In

They took the partition out, put the kitchen where the door used to be, and laid a floor that does not sound like anything when you walk on it.

It is a better room. He would say so if anybody asked him, and he did not object at the time, and he voted for it, and it was plainly the right decision for a building that had to be usable on a Tuesday.

But the room where it happened is gone. Not closed. Gone. The volume of air he stood in is now partly a kitchen and partly a corridor, and there is nowhere in that building he could stand and say this is where I was.

He did not expect that to matter. He is not a superstitious man and he would be embarrassed to be caught treating a floor as holy.

It matters anyway. He has found, over the two years since the work was done, that he cannot ask in there. He goes in, he sits, and the asking will not start, and the only account he can give of it is that his body does not believe it is in the right place.

If the room you are thinking of has been altered out of existence, come in and pick up a chair. Nobody who planned that refurbishment is going to be criticized here.

The place was a coordinate, not a container

Let us look at what the room was actually doing, because it was doing something real and it was not what he has assumed.

It was a coordinate. It let him locate the memory in space, and a located memory is easier to hold and easier to return to, and losing that is a genuine loss and not a sentimentality to be dismissed.

What it was not is a container. Nothing was stored in that volume of air. The building was not holding the thing on God's behalf, waiting for somebody to come back and open it, and no decision of a buildings committee has ever restricted what God is willing to do in a place.

He knows all of this. He would have taught it. His difficulty is that he has been asking his body to act on a distinction it has never been persuaded by.

You are not standing outside the place. Nothing a builder moved has ever contained what God did or fenced off what He will do. I am not saying it to talk a man out of a real loss. Scripture says the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded (1 Kings 8:27), which is said by a man at the dedication of the most significant building anybody had ever put up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man sitting in a room that has been remade.

Said by the builder, on the opening day

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody who did that work.

Read who says it and when, because a man defending a building would never say it and he says it anyway.

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?1 Kings 8:27

This house that I have builded. He has just finished it. Years of work, unimaginable expense, the best craftsmen available, and standing at the dedication with the whole nation watching he says out loud that the building cannot hold God.

That is not a low view of the house. He built it on purpose and it mattered. It is a refusal to confuse the place where something happened with the One who did it, made by the person with the greatest possible stake in the architecture.

You may hold the place as real and still refuse it as a container, and Scripture has the builder himself say so on the opening day. That is written into the prayer itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man on a new floor.

Nobody who did that work is being criticized

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about a committee that ruined something.

They did not. The building had to work on a Tuesday, the partition was in the wrong place, the kitchen was a problem for twenty years, and the people who spent two years of their lives on that project did it as a service and mostly without thanks. He voted for it because it was right.

And nothing here says his loss is silly. Losing the coordinate is a real loss, and a man may grieve a room without being superstitious about it.

You are asking for this again, here. The fire that stayed is the one you want, not the one you remember. Scripture says how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him (Luke 11:13), where the asking is named and no location is attached to it anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a volume of air that has been rearranged, who is being asked for.

And if these two years have cost more than the friends in that hall know, if sleep has gone, if sitting in there 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.