What Came At My Mother's Funeral

It happened in the third pew of the church he was baptized in, at his mother's funeral, during the part where nobody is doing anything.

Not grief. He knows grief and this was not that, and he has been careful with himself about the distinction because he is aware of what a funeral does to a person. This was something else that arrived while he was sitting still with his hands in his lap, and it stayed about a minute, and it was the single most solid thing that has happened to him in his adult life.

Eleven months ago.

And within a week he had begun to hand it away. Not consciously. It went like this: things like that happen at the sort of meeting his cousin goes to, on a Friday, with a band. They do not happen in a stone building at eleven in the morning with a coffin in the aisle and a priest his mother's age.

So it must, somehow, have been a thing that belonged somewhere else and got delivered to the wrong address.

He has never said that sentence out loud. It has simply been operating.

If you were met in the building of your own history and have assumed it was misdirected, sit down at this table. Nobody's church is on trial here.

Nothing was delivered to the wrong address

Let us look straight at the assumption, because it has been running for eleven months without ever being examined.

It says that certain rooms are the natural venue for God moving and other rooms are not, and that a thing occurring in the second sort has been misfiled. That belief did not come from Scripture. It came from watching, from what your cousin describes on a Friday, from the entirely reasonable observation that some rooms talk about this more than others.

Talking about a thing more is not the same as being where it happens.

You were not handed something intended for a different building. What came in the third pew came from God, to you, in the room where you were sitting. I am not saying it to console you. The written word says the wind bloweth where it listeth (John 3:8), which puts the choosing of the place entirely on His side and rules out an address list, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a stone building at eleven in the morning.

The man who woke up and named the place

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not about your cousin's Friday.

There is a man asleep outdoors on a stone, in no kind of sanctuary at all, running from a family disaster he caused himself.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16

Surely the Lord is in this place. He does not say, surely the Lord visits this sort of location. He names the actual patch of ground he woke up on, and the whole sentence turns on the word this.

And notice the second half, because it is the part that fits an eleven month assumption. And I knew it not. His not knowing was total and it had no effect whatever on where God was.

You were in a place He was already in, and Scripture has a man discovering that about the ground under his own head. That is written in his own words, and the Holy Spirit presses it home in a man in a third pew at his mother's funeral.

Nothing here is an argument about venues

Something has to be said plainly, because this is exactly where a page like this could become a complaint.

There is nothing wrong with your cousin's Friday and nothing wrong with the band, and nothing here says that room is inferior or superior to the stone one. Both are full of people God is dealing with, and this article is not going to rank them for you or suggest you swap.

The claim is only about location, and it is the smallest possible claim.

You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and the building where your mother's funeral happened is a room God was in. Scripture says in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering (Malachi 1:11), where every place is deliberately unbounded, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the style of a service, who makes that live at eleven in the morning.

And if these eleven months have cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, 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.