It Was Alive When He Said It

The vending machine on the third floor is at the end of the corridor, past the linen cart, and Curtis goes down there for a coffee because his aunt has fallen asleep mid sentence again and he needs to move.

There is a woman sitting on the floor with her back against the wall beside it.

Not making any noise. Just sitting there on the vinyl with her knees up and her phone in her hand and her face completely undone. People are walking past her the way people do, at speed, with their eyes somewhere else, because nobody knows what the rule is.

Curtis stops. He does not decide to. He crouches down a few feet away so he is not standing over her and he says, are you all right, and she says no, and then she tells him, in about nine words, what has just happened behind one of those doors.

And he says, can I pray for you.

She nods.

So he does, right there on the floor by the vending machine, out loud, not loud. And it comes out of him whole. Every phrase in the right place. The comfort of God named as a real thing and not a wish, the Lord who is near to the brokenhearted, the promise that she is not on her own in this corridor tonight, and a plain, steady ask for peace to come into her chest and stay there. It has shape. It has weight. It sounds like something somebody means.

Because he does mean it. That is the thing. He is not performing a single word of it. He would sign his name under every line.

She grips his hand for a second and says thank you and he goes back to his aunt.

It is later, in the parking lot, with the key in the ignition and the car not started, that it lands on him. He believes all of that. Completely. Not one syllable was borrowed. And he has not lived within a mile of any of it in longer than he can say, and both of those things are true at the same time, and he does not know what to do with that.

You are the one in the car with the key in the ignition. It came out of you alive, and you have spent the drive home trying to work out how something can be that alive in a person who has been that far away.

Nothing you said in that corridor was borrowed

Let me get to the accusation first, because it is already forming and I would rather meet it in the doorway.

The accusation says: if you can say it like that and live like this, one of the two must be fake, and it is obviously the saying. That is where the mind goes at speed. Hypocrite is a fast word and it arrives before anything slower can get a hearing.

It is wrong. I want to be plain about it, because it is not a small error, it is the whole hinge of tonight. You have a faith that is genuinely alive in you, and the corridor was the evidence, not the crime. That is not me being generous with you. Hebrews 4 says the word of God is living, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept it living in you through every month you were nowhere near it.

Nothing dead comes out of a person like that. Nothing rehearsed comes out with that kind of order under pressure, on a floor, beside somebody whose worst hour it is. What came out of you had joints in it. It knew where it was going. That is not a memory of faith. That is faith, awake, doing what it does the second it is given a reason.

You are not a fraud, and the distance has never once had the authority to name you one. It is written that His word is quick and powerful, and the Spirit of God carries what He has spoken whether or not the one carrying it has been paying attention lately.

Two true things at once, and one of them is not the judge

Here is the verse, and hear the verbs in it, because they are all active.

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.Hebrews 4:12

Quick is the old English for living. Not preserved. Not remembered. Living, at this moment, with its own pulse, doing its own work, in a corridor, in a car, in a person who has not opened it in a while.

So hold two things in your hands at the same time, and do not let either one eat the other. The belief is real. The distance is real. Both. And the mistake almost everybody makes is to hand one of them the gavel, so that either the distance proves the belief was fake, or the belief proves the distance does not matter. Neither. They are two facts, and only one of them is alive, and it is not the distance.

You have something in you tonight that has never stopped working, and it belongs to you and not just to the woman on the floor. Psalm 119 calls it the word hidden in the heart, Hebrews 4 calls it living, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hid it there and kept it warm without asking you to supervise Him.

I want to say one plain thing here before I go on, because it matters more than anything else on this page. If what you are carrying tonight has gone heavier than heavy, if any part of you has started saying that you are the problem and everyone would be lighter without you, then before anything else, tell one real person tonight, out loud, and let them stay with you. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local emergency number or crisis line. That is not a detour around God. It is how He has always sent help, through a human being who turns up. Then come back to this page.

Now say it about yourself

Here is the turn, and it is the only work in this whole article.

You said all of it about her. Every word aimed outward, to a stranger, on a floor, with total conviction. Now say one of those things about yourself, out loud, in the present tense, and watch what your mouth does.

Because I already know what happens. The voice changes. It goes careful. The same man who told a stranger with authority that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted will say it about himself in a smaller voice with a hedge on the end of it. That is not a character flaw and I am not scolding you for it. It is just where the wall is, and now you can see exactly where it is, and a wall you can see is a wall you can speak to.

You are near to Him right now, and the nearness is His work and not the product of a better month. Hebrews 4 keeps that word living in your mouth whether you feel near or not, and the Holy Spirit is the one closing the last of that distance while you sit reading this with the engine off.