The Wise Thing, Never The True Thing

Tuesday evenings, seven of you, and there is a point about an hour in where the room gets stuck.

Somebody has said something hard and nobody knows what to do with it and the silence goes on slightly too long.

And then you speak.

And what you say is the right thing. It usually is. You have a way of finding the sentence that lets everybody breathe again, and you do it without making it about you, and afterwards two people always find you in the hall and say thank you.

You have been doing that for six years.

Here is what has not happened in six years.

You have not once said anything true about your own week in that room.

Not because anybody has stopped you. They would be glad. Some of them would be relieved, actually, because your usefulness has started to make one or two of them feel slightly held at arm's length and they have not been able to name why.

It is that the moment the room goes quiet, you have a job, and having a job is a great deal easier than being a person.

Let me say something before we go any further.

I am not accusing you of anything.

There is no fault in this. The sentences you find are real and they have helped real people, and I am not going to reframe six years of genuine ministry as a symptom.

I am saying I noticed which sentence you never say. That is all.

Nigh to the broken

Here is a line about where God positions Himself.

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 it does not say.

It does not say the LORD is nigh unto them that are useful. It does not say nigh unto the ones who find the sentence that unsticks the room.

Nigh unto them that are of a broken heart. Nearness, positioned deliberately, at the place where a person is not managing.

And the word for nigh is spatial. It is about proximity. The psalm is describing where God stands in a room, and He stands at the part of it that is not coping.

So here it is, said directly to you, in that hallway with your scarf half on.

You are the one He is standing nearest to. Not one day, not when you can say the true thing out loud, not once you are less useful. Right now, in the doorway with everybody putting coats on, you are close to the God who positions Himself at the broken part of the room, and He has not been standing over by the wise sentence. That is not my sentiment. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it on a real person in a real hallway.

Now, why the wise thing every time?

Because it works, and because it is genuinely kind, and because it costs you almost nothing compared to the alternative.

The alternative is saying what is actually going on, and the room turning and looking, and a silence that nobody knows what to do with. Six years of filling that silence for other people leaves a person with no idea at all what happens when it is theirs.

That is not sin. That is a reasonable fear based on accurate observation of how uncomfortable those silences are, and you know exactly how uncomfortable because you have been ending them professionally.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have a nearness that is not earned by usefulness and cannot be lost by having nothing to offer. The word says He is nigh, and nigh is about position rather than about performance, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real hallway on a real Tuesday night with the coats coming off the hooks.

The room does not actually need you to be the one who ends the silence. It has managed silences before you and it will manage one that belongs to you.