I Have Run Out of Doors

Half past nine, and the urn is still ticking as it cools, and she is the last one in the church kitchen with her hands in the water.

Everybody has gone. The chairs are stacked six high against the wall, the trestle is folded, and there is one strip light on over the sink with the whole dark hall behind her through the hatch. She washes the cups in order, twenty-two of them, handles all turned the same way on the rack. She likes this part. It is the only twenty minutes in her week that nobody wants anything from her.

And tonight, with her hands in the water, she has done a piece of arithmetic she did not sit down to do.

She counted the doors.

The Tuesday group. The other Tuesday group, the one before that one. The women's weekend, twice, the second time as a helper. The book somebody swore by, and then the second book by the same author because the first one had been so good. The eight week course with the workbook, and she did every page of the homework, including the pages nobody does. The counselor, who was kind and skilled and genuinely helped her, and she would say so to anyone. The retreat house with the bell that rang at six.

Not one of those was a bad door. That is the part she cannot get anybody to hear when she tries to say this out loud. They were good doors. She walked through every one of them with her whole heart open, none of them cheated her, and each one gave her something real that she still has.

But she has run out of them.

She takes her hands out of the water and dries them on the towel hanging off the urn handle, and she stands there in a dark hall at half past nine and understands that there is no next thing on the list. There is no door number nine. And the hunger she carried through all eight of them is still standing in the kitchen with her, exactly the size it was when she started.

And here is the sentence she has decided about that, and it is the coldest one in the building. If you have been through every door and you are still hungry, then the doors are not the problem. You are.

That is what running out feels like from the inside. It is not I have not found it yet. It is colder. It has the shape of a verdict. Everyone else went through one of those doors and came out changed, and I went through all eight, and here I am at the sink with a towel.

She puts the last cup upside down on the rack. The strip light hums. The urn ticks as it cools.

Perhaps you are at your own sink tonight, or in a car with the engine off, or in a hallway at the end of a long day. And you have your own list, and every door on it was a real door you went through properly, and you are out of them.

The night everybody left

There is a chapter where a crowd walks away from Jesus, and it is the least quoted chapter in the book, and it is the one you need tonight.

They had eaten. Five thousand of them, on the grass, bread and fish until they were full. And the next day they came back around the lake looking for Him, and He told them the truth about what they were doing, and then He said something they could not carry, and John records the moment plainly: from that time many of His disciples went back and walked no more with Him.

So He turned to the twelve who were left standing there and asked them if they wanted to go too. And Peter, who was not a subtle man, answered Him with a question.

Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.John 6:68

Hear what that actually is. That is not a declaration of superior loyalty. Peter is not saying he loves Jesus more than the ones who left. Peter is saying: I have nowhere else. I have been to the other places. There is no door number nine. He is a man standing in an emptying field doing exactly the arithmetic you did at the sink, and the arithmetic comes out at zero, and the zero is what makes him say the truest sentence in his life.

You are standing where Peter was standing, and running out of doors is not the verdict you took it for. The written record puts that sentence in the mouth of the man Jesus built the church on, and it is a sentence of a man out of options. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes John 6:68 off the page and puts it in the mouth of a woman at a sink two thousand years later, in the same words, meaning the same thing.

Running out is not a report on your character. It is the end of the corridor, and the end of a corridor is where a person finally looks up.

You have been walking through good doors, not wrong ones, and nothing you did in any of them is being counted against you. Scripture never once treats the crowd's hunger as a failing. It has Jesus feeding them, then teaching them, then feeding them again, and the Holy Spirit has been in every one of those eight rooms with you doing exactly that, whether or not you could feel Him at the time.

Naming what you were actually carrying

Now I want to give you the thing this whole page is for, and I want to do it without taking a single door away from you.

Every one of those doors gave you what a door gives. Understanding. Words for something that had no words. Company on a Tuesday. Those are real and you keep all of them, and anybody who tells you they were a waste of your time is not paying attention.

What none of them gave you was a Person, because not one of them ever claimed to be one.

That is the whole of it. In that same chapter Jesus watched a crowd chase Him around a lake for more bread and He did not shame a single one of them for being hungry. He said, I am the bread of life. He that cometh to me shall never hunger. He did not hand out a better program. He handed out Himself, in the first person, as the food.

You are hungry for a Person, and the hunger has been accurate the entire time. John 6 has Him saying it in His own voice, that He is the bread which came down from heaven, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a written sentence like that land in somebody as recognition instead of information.

So the hunger was never a design fault in you and the doors were never a fraud. It kept its size through eight of them because a person is not the sort of thing a door can be substituted for. You were not failing the courses. You were carrying something into them they were not built to hold, and they held it as well as anything could, and you came out the other side still carrying it.

You were not the reason it did not work. I will say that in the plainest words I have, because you have been carrying the opposite for a long time. It is written that no one comes to Him unless the Father draws them, which means the pull you have been apologizing for is the Father's own work in you, and His Spirit is the One who has been doing the drawing, all the way down a list of eight doors, right up to a sink at half past nine.