Three People Between Me And The Aisle

It takes her about ninety seconds, and she has timed it, which tells you something about how much thought she has given it.

The walker is folded against the wall at the end of the row, because it does not fit between the seats. There are three people between her and it. All three would move instantly and gladly, and two of them would take her arm, and one would carry the walker down for her, and every second of that would happen in front of a room where the music has gone quiet and everybody is looking forward.

So when the invitation comes, and it comes most weeks, she stays in her seat.

She is not bitter about it. She is genuinely glad the invitation is given and glad when people go. But somewhere in the last few years the arithmetic settled into something else, and what it settled into is a quiet conclusion that the part of the morning where God actually does things is a part she is no longer able to attend.

If getting out of your row is an operation, sit here with me a minute. Nothing about that invitation, or about one person who has ever answered it, is going to be run down here.

The invitation is good and it was never the door

Let us be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this page and I do not want to write it.

The invitation is a good thing. It is offered by people who love God, it gives a body something to do with a decision, and standing up and walking somewhere has helped more people than either of us could count. Nothing here is against it, and if you can go, go.

What has quietly happened is different. A useful thing became, in her mind, the only door, and once a door is the only door, the distance to it becomes the distance to God. That was never in the invitation. She put it there, without noticing, over about four years.

You are not sitting outside what God is doing this morning. Nothing about a row you cannot leave has ever been the measure of your access to Him. I am not saying that to make a woman feel better about a walker. The written word says they uncovered the roof and let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay (Mark 2:4), which is a whole account built around a man who could not get through the door, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a woman who has timed her own row.

The one account where nobody could get to the front

Here is the part I keep going back to, and it takes nothing off anybody who has ever walked up an aisle.

Read what the crowd around that house actually did to the man who could not get in.

And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay.Mark 2:4

They could not come nigh. That is stated plainly and it is not treated as a failure of faith or a lack of trying. The access problem was real, physical, and entirely outside the man's control.

And the whole point of the story is that the Lord met him anyway, in the middle of the room, still on his bed, having moved himself not one inch.

You are met where you are lying and where you are sitting, and Scripture built one of its best known scenes around exactly that. That is written into the account itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it across two thousand years into a row with three people in it.

Nothing here is against the people who go forward

Something must be said plainly, or this becomes a quiet consolation prize dressed as a truth.

The people who get up and walk to the front are not putting on a display. It costs some of them a great deal to do it, and what happens up there is real, and God meets people there because God meets people. Her gladness for them is not a performance she has been keeping up. It is right.

The relief is not that the front is overrated.

You have the same access from that seat, and having it takes nothing off one person standing at the front. Scripture says whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved (Romans 10:13), where the calling is what is named and no location is attached to it anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the geography of a room, who carries what is asked.

And if these years have cost more than the people in that row know, if sleep has gone, if Sunday morning 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.