Coming Round in the Queue

There are eleven people ahead of her and a boy at the front trying to pay for a bag of bird seed with a handful of coins he is counting twice. The tills are doing that beep. Somebody's cart has the wheel. Behind her a man is on the phone saying yes, yes, I have got them, I have got them right here, and outside the open doors the sprinklers have just gone off over the shrubs and the whole yard smells of wet compost and tomato feed and warm plastic.

She looks down and there is a tray of bedding plants in her hands.

Pansies. Purple and yellow, twelve of them, and she has absolutely no memory of choosing them. Not one second of it. She came in through the doors at some point, she went along the trestles at some point, she stood in front of a shelf and made a decision, and none of that happened to anybody who is currently in this body. There is a receipt of about forty minutes and she was not present at any of it.

And this is not the strange part. The strange part is that it is Saturday, and Saturday is not the problem, and neither is the queue. It is the whole of it. She got through Christmas like this. She sat through her nephew's christening like this, and she can tell you the color of the font and nothing else. She has been running her life competently, kindly, without dropping anything, from somewhere about four inches behind her own eyes, and she could not tell you when that started, and she is not unhappy, exactly, which is somehow the worst part of the description.

Then the queue shuffles, and the sprinkler catches the edge of the doorway, and for about four seconds the smell of the wet compost comes all the way in. All the way. And she is there. Standing on a rubber mat in a garden center with twelve pansies and a woman's voice saying next please, entirely and unmistakably present in her own Saturday. And it is so ordinary and so enormous that her eyes sting.

Then it goes, and she pays, and she puts the tray in the trunk. But something has been jogged. And I want to talk to you about who did the jogging, because you have had your four seconds too, and you may have filed it under nothing.

Who is holding you here

Let me start where it actually hurts, because this one gets described as if it were a scheduling problem.

Living from behind your own eyes is not a discipline failure. It is what a person does when there has been more coming at them than they could feel at the pace it was arriving, so something in them turned the sound down and kept the hands working. It is competent. It is often the reason everybody around them is fine. And it is desperately lonely in a way that is hard to complain about, because from the outside nothing is wrong: the answering happens, the cooking happens, the driving happens, the laughing lands in the right places. Nobody is going to ask whether all is well, because from where they stand, all plainly is.

So the first thing I want to say is that nobody here is in trouble. Not with God, not with me. Nothing about this is a charge sheet, and the four seconds in the doorway were not a warning shot.

They were kindness. Paul, standing in front of a crowd of Athenian philosophers who could talk about anything and had touched nothing, said this about the God who made the world:

He is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.Acts 17:27 to 28

Sit in that for a second. Not far. Not observing from a distance while you sleepwalk through a Saturday. The word he uses is in: in Him you live, in Him you move, in Him you have your being. Which means the presence was never something you generate by concentrating. It is the medium you are already standing in, the way a fish is in water whether or not the fish is paying attention.

So take this now, as a settled thing. You are held here already, not once you have improved your attention, but right now, in the queue, four inches behind your own eyes and all. Scripture says it is in Him that you live and move and have your being, and it is His Spirit who takes a sentence written for a crowd of strangers in Athens and drops it into a garden center on a Saturday morning.

And that changes what those four seconds were. They were not you finally managing it. Nobody wakes themselves up. A person cannot decide to be present any more than a person can decide to remember a dream, and every attempt to force it produces a tighter, more watchful version of the same absence. Which is why I am not going to hand you an exercise.

Here is what Scripture hands you instead:

Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you. Ephesians 5:14. Read the order. The command comes first and the light comes second, and the light is entirely His. He is not asking you to generate the shining. He is asking you to sit up in bed, and then He does the sun.

So hear this and let it settle. You are being woken on purpose, gently, by Somebody who is good at it. That is what stands written, and it is His Spirit doing the waking rather than your resolve, which is why it has been arriving in things like wet compost and a certain slant of light and one line of a song in a supermarket. He knows where the door into you is. He has been using it.

Now, the part that turns knowing into having, and it is smaller than you think. Jesus said that the amount of faith needed to move an actual mountain is a seed, one of the least impressive objects a person could hold. Matthew 17:20. Then He said the seed speaks. Not strains, not concentrates. Speaks. Which is very good news for somebody who has been running at four inches remove, because you do not have to feel present in order to say a true sentence out loud, and saying it is often the thing that brings you into the room.

You have the standing to say it. It belongs to you because you were seated with Christ and He is in you, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives an ordinary sentence its weight. Not the intensity you can summon on a Saturday.