The Sunday She Did Not Go

She polished the shoes on Saturday night. That is the part she keeps going back over. She sat at the kitchen table with the cloth and the little tin and she did both shoes properly, the way her mother did them, working the polish into the seam where the sole meets the leather.

They are by the chair now. One of them is on its side.

The clock on the cable box says 10:12. Her keys are on the table by the door with the church bulletin from three weeks ago under them, and her coat is on the back of the kitchen chair where she put it at 9:40 when she still thought she was going.

She got one shoe on. That is as far as it went. She was sitting on the edge of the armchair with her foot in the second shoe and her hand on the heel of it, and something in her arm simply stopped, the way an arm does when it has decided before you have, and she sat up and put her hands in her lap and did not move again.

The radio is off. She turned it on at ten and there was a service on it, an organ and a congregation somewhere singing something she knows every word of, and she listened for maybe forty seconds and then reached over and turned it off. That was worse than the silence. She could not have told anybody why.

Outside, a car starts. She knows whose it is without looking, because it has that catch on the second turn, and she knows exactly what time they leave to get a seat near the back on the left, and she knows they will be walking through the doors in nine minutes and that somebody will ask them where she is.

This is the third one. That is the thing sitting on her chest at 10:12 with one shoe on.

The first Sunday she had a reason and it was a good reason and everybody said so. The second Sunday the reason was thinner but she could still say it out loud. This morning she did not bother making one, and somewhere between the second Sunday and this one she quietly stopped keeping a list of reasons and started keeping a case.

All week the case has been building. Little bits of evidence dropped in through the day, at the sink, in the car, at two in the morning: this is what you are like now. This is what your faith actually is when nobody is watching. Three weeks. That is not a hard season, that is a person who has stopped.

The dust is turning in the light in front of the window. The house is very quiet.

One shoe on, at ten past ten, on the third Sunday.

What did not happen at ten past ten

I want to say plainly what did not happen in that room, because a week of quiet prosecution has probably convinced you otherwise.

God did not leave when you sat down.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Read what the nearness answers to. It does not say the Lord is near to those who got there. It does not say near to those who managed it, or near to the ones who pushed through, or near to whoever polished their shoes and then actually walked out of the door. The nearness in that line answers to a broken heart. That is the whole condition. The break is what draws Him, not the arrival.

Which means that at 10:12, in a quiet house with one shoe on, the conditions of Psalm 34:18 were met completely.

You are the exact person that verse is written about, and you were that person at ten past ten with your hand still on the heel of the second shoe. I am not saying that to make you feel better about the morning. It is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line and brings it right up close to a woman in an armchair who has not been able to say a word all week.

You have not been left alone in that chair for one minute of the last three weeks. The nearness in His word is not a distance you cover. It is a position He takes, and the same Spirit who fills a room with an organ in it does not go quiet in a room with the radio switched off.

The week you spent building a case

Now the harder part, and I am going to be careful with it, because you have had a week of somebody being careless with it.

For seven days you have been both the prosecutor and the person in the chair. Every hour has been filing something. And the case is not really about Sunday at all. The case is about what kind of person you turn out to be, and Sunday was only the evidence that finally got admitted.

I am not going to give you the verdict for the defense, either. I know that is what you came for. But a verdict is exactly what has been eating you all week, and handing you a nicer one keeps you in the courtroom, and you have been in the courtroom long enough.

There is no trial. That is the actual news. You are not being weighed this week, and you were never on the stand at all. Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that stop being a doctrine and start being the quiet in a house at ten past ten.

And one plain thing, said once and then left alone. If this has been most mornings for weeks rather than this one morning, please tell your doctor. That is not a spiritual failure and going is not a retreat, and a body that has stopped cooperating is a thing to have looked at, not a thing to pray harder about.

You have a place among God's people that a Sunday morning did not create, and a missed Sunday has no power to cancel it. That belonging was written into the covenant long before there was a service to attend, and the Spirit who sealed you did not attach the seal to your attendance.