The Room Went Far Away

There were nine candles, and somebody had lit them twice, because the first match went out in the draft from the back door.

He was standing at the end of the kitchen with his back near the fridge, which is where he always ends up at these things, and the big light was off so the candles would look like something. Eleven people in a room built for four. His sister holding the cake board with both hands. Somebody's coat still on. The dog shut in the front room and not happy about it.

And they sang.

It happened in the middle of the second line. Not a bang, not a wave, nothing dramatic enough for anybody to look up. The room simply moved back about six feet and flattened out.

That is the only way he has ever been able to say it. The kitchen went from a place he was standing in to a picture of a kitchen he was looking at. The singing arrived half a second after the mouths made it. The magnets on the fridge, which he had seen a thousand times, looked like magnets he had never seen in his life. His own hand, holding a paper plate, looked like a photograph of a hand holding a paper plate.

He could hear himself joining in on the last line. That was the strangest part of all. From somewhere behind his own face he could hear his own voice singing her name, perfectly normally, at the right pitch, while the room he was singing in stood a long way off and appeared to be made of nothing.

Nine candles went out. Everybody cheered. Somebody started cutting.

And he stood there and did the arithmetic everybody does. Nobody has noticed. If I say something now I will ruin this. How long has it been. Is it getting worse. What if it does not come back this time.

Then, somewhere between the first slice and the second, the kitchen came back. It always does. It came back the way sound comes back after a plane goes over. And he was left by the fridge with a paper plate, holding a piece of cake he did not want, sick with relief, shaking slightly, and absolutely determined that nobody would ever know.

That is you, and I want to say the first thing straight away, because I think you have been carrying it for a while.

That is not madness. That is not you losing your mind, and it is not the beginning of losing it. And it is not a failure of faith. A body under a long load does that: it turns the volume down on the room in order to protect you, it does it without asking, and it picks the worst possible moments because the worst possible moments are usually the loud ones. It is not a verdict on your walk with God. Nobody is disappointed in you at a birthday party.

And one plain thing, said once and said warmly, and then I will leave it alone. A body doing this deserves to be looked at by a doctor. Not because anything here is your fault, and not because something is certainly wrong, but because you deserve to be checked over by somebody who knows how, and because I am never going to be the one who tells you what is and is not happening inside your own chest. Going is wise. Going is not a lack of trust. Go.

Not far from any one of us

Paul is standing in the middle of a loud, crowded, foreign city, in front of people who have no idea who he is, and he says something that has been waiting two thousand years for a kitchen at a birthday party.

That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being.Acts 17:27-28

Feel after him. That is a phrase written for people who cannot see well at that particular moment. It is the word for hands out in a dark corridor. Paul does not say seek him with a clear head and a steady pulse. He says feel after, the way somebody finds a wall.

And then comes the line that turns the whole speech: though he be not far from every one of us.

Not far. In a room that has just gone six feet away from you and flattened out, the distance you can feel is not the distance that is actually there.

So take this exactly as it stands written. You are not far from God right now, in the flat room, in the half second of delay, with the singing arriving late. Acts 17:27 says He is not far from any one of us, and there is no clause anywhere in it about how present the room feels, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds that true in you while your own senses have gone quiet.

Then Paul goes further, and this is the line I want in your hands.

In him we live, and move, and have our being.

Not near him. In him. Paul is not describing a good relationship with a distant God. He is describing where a person is standing, always, including at the moment they cannot feel the floor.

Which means the room going far away moved you precisely nowhere. You are inside Him while it happens, and you were inside Him while it was happening at that party, and Scripture puts it in the present continuous on purpose: we live and move and have our being, right now, mid sentence, and His Spirit is the one making that a fact rather than a feeling.

Now, about what your body was doing. I am not going to explain your symptoms to you and I would not know how; those belong to you and to whoever you trust to look at them. But I can tell you what it is not, in the one place I have any authority to speak at all. It is not God leaving the room. It is not His presence withdrawn as a comment on you. Whatever your senses did in that kitchen, they were never the instrument that measured your standing with Him, so they cannot have been reporting on it.

And there is something almost tender in it, if you can bear a kind thought about your own body tonight. It turned the volume down on a room because it was trying to look after you. It was clumsy and it picked a terrible moment. But you have never once been abandoned by the God who was holding you together while it happened, His word says He upholds all things by the word of His power, and it is His Spirit who kept the room and kept you inside it when you could feel neither.