Ten Minutes After the Smile

The hall empties faster than it fills. That is always the way. Forty minutes to get everybody in and about six for the room to go from full to a man coiling a cable and two women stacking chairs at the far end and somebody's cardigan still on the back of seat nine.

She is sitting in a chair that has been turned to face the wall. Not dramatically. Somebody swung it round earlier to reach a socket and never turned it back, and she sat down in it because it was the nearest one, and now she is looking at a wall the color of weak tea with a scuff on it at knee height and a poster for a jumble sale that finished in June.

Behind her the microphone is still on its stand and still live, faintly humming, because nobody has gone up to the desk yet. Every so often the hum changes pitch when the fridge in the kitchen cycles.

Ten minutes ago she was the warmest thing in this room. That is not vanity, it is just true, and everybody there felt it. She hugged people. She meant every hug. She held a woman's hands and said something that woman is going to think about at the bus stop tomorrow, and it was not a technique, it came up out of her and it was real.

And then the room drained, and it went out of her like water out of a bath, and the face she has on now is not a face anybody in that room has seen.

Her friend puts her head round the door and says, "That was great, well done," and she turns and smiles and says thanks, and the smile is real too, it comes on properly, it reaches the eyes, and her friend goes away entirely satisfied. Then it goes again. And that is the part she has never been able to explain to anybody: that both are real. The one they got and the one that is here now, facing a wall, with the fridge cycling.

There is a thought she has had a few times and pushed away every time, and today it has got as far as words. It goes: they know the ten minutes, and nobody knows the ten minutes after, and I have started to suspect the second ten is the real one.

She is not going to say that to anyone. Not because she is hiding, exactly. Because saying it would sound like a complaint about people who have done nothing wrong, and because she does not have the sentence for it, and because the woman stacking chairs would look up with a worried face and then she would be managing that too.

So she sits and looks at the scuff on the wall. Somebody has to go and turn the microphone off. It will be her.

You know that room, and it may not have a stage in it. It might be the ninety seconds in the car before you walk into your own house. It might be the corridor at work after a meeting where you were, by common agreement, brilliant. I am not going to tell you to be honest with somebody. I want to tell you who is in the room during the second ten minutes, because there is Someone, and He has been there for all of them.

The verse everybody has used as a threat

There is a sentence in Hebrews that has been used to frighten people for about four hundred years, and it was never a threat.

And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.Hebrews 4:13

Preached cold, that is a searchlight. Nothing is hidden, so brace yourself. And for somebody sitting in a chair facing a wall with a face on that nobody in the building has seen, a searchlight is the last thing on earth she needs.

Read what comes next, though. Read the very next breath. The writer says that we have a high priest who is not unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, one who has been through everything we have been through, and therefore, he says, come boldly to the throne of grace. Therefore. The exposure and the boldness are joined in the same paragraph, on purpose. Being completely seen is not the warning in this passage. It is the ground the invitation stands on.

Which changes what nothing is hidden means for you. It does not mean the second ten minutes has been caught. It means the second ten minutes has been kept.

You are seen in the ten minutes after, exactly as fully as in the ten minutes of it. That is what Hebrews 4:13 says and what the two verses after it are for, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a sentence people have used as a searchlight and turns it into the only company in a hall that has emptied. Nobody had to be told. Nobody had to be managed. It has been the whole time.

And I want to say something about the smile before we go any further, because you are braced for it.

The smile was not a lie. That is the thing almost nobody gets right about you. When you turned round and said thanks and it reached your eyes, that was real; it came on because there is genuine warmth in you and it arrives when a person is in front of you. What is also real is what is there when the door closes. Two true things, not one true and one false. You are not divided in two, and you were not performing. Scripture says everything is open before Him, and the Holy Spirit is the One who holds a whole person together in His sight when they cannot hold the two halves together in their own.

What a high priest is actually for

Let me stay with the passage, because the next verse is doing something specific for you.

He is not unable to sympathize with our weaknesses. That is a careful double negative and the writer chose it. He does not say the high priest tolerates weakness or overlooks it. He says the high priest is not incapable of feeling it with you, having been in it Himself. The whole letter is written to people who were exhausted and beginning to drift, not to people doing well.

And then: come boldly. Not tidily. Not once you have got your face back on. Boldly, which is a word about walking straight in.

So here is what that means for a woman in a chair turned to a wall. There is no version of you that has to be assembled before you are received. There is no arriving properly. You have a welcome that does not require the face you had ten minutes ago. It is written that we may come boldly to the throne of grace, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an invitation from a first century letter operative in a hall with the chairs half stacked.

I am not going to hand you an instruction here. I am not going to tell you to open up to your friend, or to let somebody in, or to stop being the warm one. That is your life and you know its shape far better than I do, and adding a task to a person in the second ten minutes is how well meant writing does harm. If a person to talk to comes, that is a gift and I hope it comes. This is not about that.

This is about the fact that during those ten minutes you were not alone in the room. You were company for God the whole time you were facing that wall. It is written that nothing is hidden from His sight, and His Spirit does not leave when the warmth goes out of a person, because He never came for the warmth. He came for the person.