I Thought It Was a Waiting Room

Nine years in this house and the walls are still bare.

She is in the front room in the evening with a lamp on and the curtains still open on a dark street, waiting for the kettle in the kitchen to click off, and she is looking at the wall over the fireplace the way you look at a person you have been arguing with.

There is a box in the hall closet with picture hooks in it. There are four framed things in that box, wrapped in the same newspaper they were wrapped in when she moved. She has never once thought of herself as somebody who does not hang pictures. She has thought of herself as somebody who is about to move on, and you do not put holes in the walls of a place you are about to leave.

Nine years of about to.

Her life is small and she can describe the exact size of it. Eleven streets. The same road to work and the same road back. Four people she speaks to properly, five if you count her mother on Sundays. The same Tuesday, over and over, in a good coat.

She is not complaining. That is the part that would take her an hour to explain to anybody. There is nothing wrong with any of it. Nobody is being cruel to her. The room is warm, the chair is comfortable, the street outside is quiet and safe and mostly kind. If you laid her week out on a table and asked what needs fixing, she could not point at anything.

And she is starving in it.

Three separate people have said the same sentence to her over the last few years, all of them kindly, all of them meaning to encourage her, and she has taken it home each time and it has done the opposite. Faithful in little. Be faithful in the little things.

And every single time, what she heard was: wait here.

Wait here, in the small room, in the good coat, on the eleven streets. Keep your head down and do it well and do not make a fuss. This is the small one. The real one is coming later, and this is what you do in the meantime, and the meantime is nine years long so far and there are hooks in a box in the closet.

That is what a waiting room does to a person. Nobody decorates a waiting room. Nobody puts down roots in a corridor. You sit near the door with your coat over your arm and you do not get comfortable, because getting comfortable in a waiting room means you have accepted that this is it, and she has not accepted that, and she will not, and so she has spent nine years being a guest in her own front room.

The kettle clicks off in the kitchen. She does not get up right away.

Perhaps you know that wall. Perhaps yours is a spare room full of boxes, or a shelf you never filled, or a whole life you have been living at arm's length in case it turned out not to be the real one.

Read the sentence again

Here is the line that got repeated to her, in the words Jesus actually used.

He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.Luke 16:10

Read it slowly, because almost everybody who quotes it adds a word that is not there, and the word they add is then.

He did not say, be faithful in the least and then you get much. There is no then. There is no waiting period, no probation, no smaller room you are held in until somebody upstairs signs off on you. He says the one who is faithful in least is faithful in much, which is a sentence about a person and not a sentence about a schedule.

It describes something continuous. The faithfulness does not change size when the room does. It is the same faithfulness in a small kitchen and in a large one, in eleven streets and in eleven countries, and Jesus is naming a quality that runs straight through a person's life at whatever scale that life happens to arrive in.

You are not on probation, and this room is not the corridor outside your life. That is what the written sentence says when the invented then is taken back out of it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who can lift a misheard line off a person who has been carrying it for nine years and put the real one in its place.

And here is what that does to the arithmetic. If the size of the room is not the subject of the sentence, then the size of the room is not the measure of you, and it never was, and nobody who quoted that verse at you meant to suggest otherwise.

You have been faithful in a room nobody is grading you on. The word does not attach a scale to the word faithful, and the Holy Spirit does not run a comparison between your eleven streets and somebody else's map. He is not a supervisor. He is a Person who has been in the room.

Someone was already in the place

Now here is a man who woke up in the smallest situation in his book and found out what was in it.

Jacob was running, sleeping in the open, with a stone under his head. Not a chosen simplicity. Not a season he had planned. He was in a nowhere place because a nowhere place was where he had ended up, and this is what he said when he woke.

Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16

He did not say the Lord came to this place. He said the Lord is in this place and I did not know. God was there before Jacob lay down. The stone was already a doorstep. What changed at dawn was not the location. It was that a man found out where he had been sleeping.

You are in a room the Lord is already in, and He did not arrive when you noticed. Genesis 28:16 is the written record of a man discovering it late and nobody in the text holds the lateness against him, and the Holy Spirit is the One who does the same work now, opening a person's eyes to a Presence that was there through all nine years of the bare wall.

And I want to say one thing warmly and plainly here, because some of you are in a small room that you did not pick and could not leave if you decided to tonight. Some lives are small by force. Illness holds them there, or caring for somebody does, or circumstances nobody chose and nobody is going to lecture you about. If that is you, hear this: God is not grading the size, He is not waiting for you to expand before He arrives, and nothing on this page is asking you to make peace with anything or to step back from a single person you are carrying. He is in the room you are actually in, tonight, exactly as it is.

You were never asked to earn the Presence by widening the room. It is written that He is in this place, present tense, of a place chosen by nobody, and His Spirit is the One who makes that true for a hospital chair, a small front room, a kitchen at the end of eleven streets.