I Can Lead A Room Into It

Yolanda knows the exact minute it happens and she has never told a living soul.

It is usually about forty minutes in. The room is open by then. She can feel it the way you feel weather, and she knows what to do next, and she does it, and it works, and people meet God in that room. That is not her being grand about herself. It is a simple report and other people would give the same one.

And at some point in the middle of it, every single time, while a hundred and something people are somewhere she has taken them, there is a beat of about two seconds where Yolanda is aware that she is not there with them.

She is at the front, working. Watching the room, listening for what it needs, holding the thing steady with both hands.

She is the only one in the building who is not in the room.

She has done this for nineteen years. She is very good at it. Younger women ask her how she does it and she tells them, generously and in detail, and everything she tells them is true and it works for them too.

And she has never once, in the whole of her life, had the thing she has led perhaps four thousand people into.

She does not think she is a fraud. She has examined that carefully and rejected it, because what happens in those rooms is not her manufacturing anything. It is real and it does not depend on her state.

But there is a sentence that has arrived in her, three or four times, always in the car afterwards, and it is this: I am the doorman.

She opens it. Everybody goes through. She stands in the corridor and closes up.

You may have a version of that corridor.

Maybe you lead worship, or a small group, or you are the one people phone. Maybe you have prayed for forty people to receive something you have never received, and you meant every word, and it worked, and you drove home.

Somebody put this in the Bible

There is a line in the Song of Songs that is so honest it is almost startling to find it in Scripture, and it is spoken by a woman explaining why she looks the way she does.

They made me the keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.Song of Songs 1:6

That is your sentence and it has been sitting in there for three thousand years.

Look at what it does and does not say. It does not say she was wrong to keep the vineyards. It does not say the vineyards suffered, and by every indication they did not; she is clearly good at it, that is why they gave them to her. And it does not tell her to resign.

It just says the true thing out loud, in the first person, without a lesson attached.

And you are allowed to say that sentence without it being an accusation against you. The written word puts it in a woman's own mouth with no rebuke following it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that permission real to somebody who has been carrying it silently for nineteen years.

And nothing about the keeping of other vineyards is evidence about yours. The word makes those two separate clauses in one sentence, joined by a but rather than a therefore, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than reading your ministry as a verdict on your interior.

The thing you have concluded, and the flaw in it

Now let me get at the conclusion underneath, because I think there is one and I think it is quiet.

I am the doorman. That is the sentence in the car.

And inside it is an assumption: that the doorman does not get in. That there is a room, and there are people who get to be in it, and there is a category of person whose job is the door, and you have been assigned to that category, and the assignment explains nineteen years of experience.

Here is the flaw. Nobody in that building got in by being let in.

You did not let them in. You are extremely good at what you do and what you do is not admissions. Whatever happened to those four thousand people happened because the wind blew, and Jesus said the wind blows where it wills and nobody can account for it, and that includes you at the front with both hands on the thing.

You have been reading your own skill as the mechanism, and then reasoning from the mechanism to your exclusion.

And you were never operating the door. The word says the wind bloweth where it listeth and thou canst not tell whence it cometh, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a demotion to a woman who has been holding something steady for nineteen years.

And He divides to every one severally as He will. The word says all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will, and the Spirit is the one distributing rather than a queue you were left out of.

What you have not let yourself have

One more, and then I will send you to a window.

For nineteen years you have been in a room where something is happening, in the one posture in that room that cannot receive: watching, holding, listening for what is needed next.

That is not exclusion. That is a job, and you took it, and it is honorable work, and somebody has to do it.

But you have never once been a person in that room. Not because you were barred. Because you were working.

And I am not going to tell you to step back from the front, because I do not know your church or your circumstances and that is not mine to say. I am telling you that the corridor you think you have been assigned to is a corridor you have been standing in on shift, and a shift ends.

And there is a posture available to you that is not the one you work in. The word says be still, and know that I am God, and the Spirit is the one who supplies stillness, which is not the same thing at all as stopping.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that rather than waiting for you to have a story like everybody else's.