Nine Minutes on the Platform

Twenty to eleven, and the board says nine minutes.

She has come off a late and her feet have that particular ache, the one that starts in the heels and works up. The wind comes through the underpass in a long push and drops. Two lads down the far end are laughing at something on the bench. The platform is otherwise hers.

Nine minutes. She has a way of doing this wait. Everybody who travels at this hour has one, and hers has worked for years, and it has never once let her down: nine minutes go somewhere and then the train arrives and she goes home.

So she reaches for it, the way you reach for a light switch in your own hallway.

And nothing happens.

Not badly. That is the strange part. It does not go wrong, it does not turn on her, it does not make her feel anything at all. It is like biting into something that has no taste. She tries again, because obviously she has done it wrong, and it is the same. The thing has simply stopped.

She stands there with nine minutes in her hands and nothing to put in them. The quiet is not peaceful. It is just empty, and it has edges, and she can feel the shape of it.

And she knows the shape. She has known the shape since she was small enough to sit on a hard chair and be told what it was called. Knowing has not been the problem for a long time.

The board changes to four minutes. She has not moved.

You are the one on the platform. The thing you use for the waiting is not doing anything for you tonight, and you have not got a name for what that means, and underneath it there is a worry you would be embarrassed to say out loud: that turning toward God at the exact hour something else went flat looks so much like using Him as the spare.

The thing that stopped working never lied to you

Start here, because most people start somewhere unkind and it costs them the evening.

The thing that has filled that wait for years was not a betrayal and it was not a fraud. It did a real job, at the size it was, and it did it honestly for a long time. What it never was, and never claimed to be, is a fulness. It was a filler. Fillers are exactly as good as fillers are, and one day a filler simply stops being able to reach the place it was reaching, and that is not a moral event. It is a size problem.

So put down whatever sentence was forming about how any of this got here. That is not the sentence for tonight, and it is not a sentence God is waiting to hear.

Look instead at how David says it, because he uses a word that changes the whole shape of the thing.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.Psalm 16:11

In thy presence. Not from Thy hand, not out of Thy stores, not delivered at intervals. In. Fulness in that verse is not a supply that arrives and gets used up. It is a location. It is somewhere you stand, and the reason it does not run out is that it was never a quantity in the first place.

You have somewhere to go at this exact hour, and the somewhere is a place and not a portion. That is not my optimism talking. It is written in Psalm 16, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has made the emptiness on that platform legible to you tonight, which is not something an accusation does to a person.

The hour it goes flat is a door, not a sentence

Here is the worry underneath, and it deserves to be said out loud rather than left to work in the dark.

The worry is that turning to Him now is transparent. That He can see the timing as well as anyone can, that a person who arrives on the night the other thing stopped working has arrived with an empty hand and a bad look, and that somewhere behind the welcome there will be a note made about the hour they showed up.

There is no note. Read the whole psalm and see who is speaking: a man saying the Lord is his portion, his cup, the one who holds his lot, and none of that is spoken from a life that has been running well without help. Nobody in Scripture ever comes to God at a convenient moment. They come when the thing gave out, and the coming is never once graded on the hour it happened.

You are welcome tonight, at this hour, on this platform, and nothing about the timing is being held against you. I am not inventing that over you. Psalm 16 puts the fulness in His presence rather than in the condition of the one arriving, and it is His Spirit standing beside you at the board, which is why this is landing instead of sliding off.

Nine minutes is more than enough room to turn

Now the part that makes this doable before the train comes.

Turning is not a journey. It is not a program, it is not something you begin tonight and complete over the autumn, and it is emphatically not a long walk back through every wait you filled the other way. Turning is done on the spot, with the feet where they already are. You face a different direction and you say something. That is the whole mechanism.

That is why the platform is a perfectly good place for it. There is no better location and no better hour waiting further down the line. If fulness is a place and the place is His presence, then the distance to it is the width of one sentence, and Scripture never once shows anybody being made to travel further than that.

You have the standing to turn where you stand and speak, and it is standing given to you in Christ rather than earned back over a good month. That is what the written word says about anybody in Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence like that, which is a distance He has already crossed from His side.