No Next Episode

The last one is forty-eight minutes and he watches all of it, and it is good, and the music comes up over the last shot the way it is supposed to.

Then the credits. And he waits, because there is always the little countdown in the corner, the one that gives you five seconds to do nothing and be carried on into the next thing. He is not even deciding. His thumb is already resting where the button would be.

The countdown does not come. There is no next one. There is a menu, and a suggestion of something else with a different cast, and then after a while the screen goes to that slow drifting screensaver of a beach nobody has ever been to.

And the room comes back.

It comes back all at once, the way a room does. The radiator making its noise. The mug on the floor by the chair with an inch left in it. A car going past outside and the light from it moving across the ceiling and gone. Half past two on the clock on the shelf, which he does not need to look at, because he knows.

He is not upset. That is the strange part and it is the part worth saying. He is not sad and he is not ashamed and he is not thinking about his life. He is just sitting in a room at half past two with nothing playing, and there is nowhere to go, and the thing he has been going to every night for a long while has quietly run out of what it had.

You have been in that room. It might not have been a screen at all. It might be the work that always needed doing, or the calendar you keep full, or a person you talk to, or a house you keep improving, or a silence you go into that does not have a name. I am not going to guess and I am not going to name it, because whatever I named would be wrong for most of the people reading this and it would sting the ones I got right. All I know is the hour. The hour when the thing you go to does not do the thing it does.

Everything has a last episode

I want to say something about the thing that ran out, and I want to say it without one grain of contempt in it, because contempt is not what happened to you tonight.

It did not betray you. It did exactly what it was built to do. It ran to the end of what it had.

That is not a moral failure in a thing. It is a property of things. A season is a fixed number of hours and then it is over. A project finishes. A person can carry a certain amount and then they need carrying themselves. A song is three and a half minutes and then the room comes back, and the room coming back is not the song's fault and it is not yours either.

So there is no verdict in this room at half past two. There is a fact, and the fact is arithmetic and not character: you are sitting in the ordinary end of a finite thing, and that is all that has happened here, and it is not evidence about you. That is not me being soft. Scripture is the thing that separates what runs out from what does not, and it is His Spirit and not the hour of the night who has kept you sitting still long enough to notice the difference.

To whom shall we go

There is a moment in John's Gospel that almost nobody preaches, and it is the one I want to put in your hands.

Jesus has said something hard and a great many people who had been following Him decide they have had enough and go home. It is a real exodus. And He turns to the twelve, and He asks them, without any drama in it at all: will ye also go away?

Peter answers. And what he says is not a declaration of love and it is not a boast about his own commitment. It is arithmetic, out loud:

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

Read what that actually is. It is a man who has looked around the room and found it empty of alternatives, saying so to Jesus' face. Where else. There is nowhere else. Thou hast the words, and I have looked.

And here is what I want you to notice more than anything in this article. That sentence is in the Bible. It was not tidied up. Nobody went back and gave Peter a better line, one that sounded more devoted and less like a man at two in the morning who has run out of options. It stayed exactly as he said it, and it stayed because it is not a lesser kind of coming.

You have Peter's own sentence available to you at this hour, and it is not a downgraded version of the real thing, it is what the real thing sounded like the first time. John 6 is written and it was never edited, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept an unflattering answer in the book so that somebody sitting in a dark room would find it and know they were not disqualified.

The hour is the hour

Now the timing, because this is where people put it down.

The instinct is to wait. Not until things have improved, exactly. Just until it is a more respectable hour to turn up. Until the morning, when it will look less like you came because you had nowhere else to be. Until there has been a good week behind it, so that the turning is about Him and not about the fact that the thing ran out.

That instinct will cost you tonight and it is built on something that is not in the Bible anywhere.

Nowhere does Scripture require a decent interval. The prodigal in Luke 15 got up and went while he was still hungry, and being hungry was the reason, and the father ran anyway and never mentioned the reason once. Peter said where else would I go, and Jesus did not say come back when you can phrase that better.

You are welcome at the exact hour it stopped working, and you do not have to launder the reason first. That is Luke 15 and John 6 together, both written, neither softened, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is making a dark room at half past two into a place where somebody is being received rather than assessed.

So do not wait for morning. Morning is a version of the long road back, and there is no long road here.