The order of service is printed on thick cream card, and she has folded it in half and back again so many times during the first hymn that the crease has gone soft.
Her niece asked her to do the reading. Not the bride's mother, not the best man's girlfriend who does something in theater: her. "You have the voice for it, Auntie," she said on the phone, and there was no arguing with the girl. So here she is in the second pew on the bride's side, in the good navy coat, between her brother, who is crying already, and a small cousin who has been given a bag of confetti and told to hold it shut. The church is full and warm and smells of lilies and floor polish, and when the vicar nods she goes up.
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love. She looks down for the first line and then she does not need to. She has known this chapter since she was a girl in a Sunday dress with white socks, and the words come out of her in the right order at the right speed with the weight in the right places, love is patient, love is kind, and she means every one of them. That is the thing. She is not performing it. She believes it, all of it, the way she believes the floor is under her. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. She looks up on never ends and the whole church is looking at her, and her brother has both hands over his face.
Afterwards, on the walk down the lane to the marquee with the confetti still in everybody's hair, three people tell her she read it like she meant it. And she did. And somewhere between the lychgate and the field, with the small cousin swinging off her hand and the band tuning up ahead, a thought arrives that she has not let arrive in a long time. She has just said sixty lines of Scripture out loud, perfectly, to two hundred people. She could not tell you when she last said one line of anything to God.
Not about Him. To Him. Not a doubt in her, not one. Just a distance, and no story to explain it.
And you know that lane. You have never doubted a word of it either. You could still read the chapter without looking down. You would still write it on any form that asked, and if a stranger asked you what you believe you would tell them, and it would be true. And you have not lived near it in longer than you let yourself count.
Two true things, and neither one is a charge
You are safe here, and let us go slowly, because this is the ache that hides best. It hides behind something real. You have used the fact that you never doubted as a certificate that nothing is wrong, and the certificate is genuine. Your belief is not fake. It is not a leftover. It is the faith of somebody who never left the faith. Nobody in this room is going to tell you otherwise, and if a voice in you has been suggesting that a believer this far from home cannot really believe, that voice is not the Holy Spirit; His written word calls the faith of a person like you a gift, and He does not take gifts back for distance.
But there are two true things here, and you have been holding up one to hide the other. What I believe is true. And it is not where I live. Both sentences are true at once, and neither one puts the other on trial. The distance does not make the belief a lie. The belief does not make the distance nothing. A person can own a house outright and not have slept in it in years, and the deeds are still real, and so is the dust.
Peter knew that. On the worst night, the text says something small and terrible: Peter followed at a distance (Luke 22:54). Not Peter left. Not Peter stopped believing. He had said, hours before, that he would go to prison and to death with Him, and he meant it, and I think he still meant it in the courtyard with his hands out to the fire. His faith was intact and he was standing as far off as he could get while still being able to see. That is where you are standing, and it is not the same as gone, and the Spirit who had that line written down did not write it as a charge.
The other fire
Here is what Jesus did about it, and I want you to notice what He did not do. He did not send for Peter and ask him to account for the distance. He did not ask him whether he still believed. He went to the beach where Peter had gone back to fishing, and He lit a fire, and He cooked.
Jesus said to them, "Come and have breakfast." Now none of the disciples dared ask him, "Who are you?" They knew it was the Lord.John 21:12
Read that middle sentence twice. None of them dared ask who He was, because they knew. Their belief was never the question on that beach. What was missing was not knowledge, it was nearness, and Jesus supplied the nearness Himself: the shore, the charcoal, the fish already cooking, the invitation, and then bread put into their hands. Peter had swum a hundred yards through cold water to get there, but the fire was lit before he was wet.
So hear this on your lane. You have been brought near, and the bringing was never your walking. Scripture says it in so many words: you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ (Ephesians 2:13). Brought. It is done to you. And the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a fire on a beach two thousand years ago warm on a Saturday afternoon in a wedding coat. I am not describing a walk you have to make. I am describing a breakfast that is already on.
What He asked instead
When they had eaten, He asked Peter one thing, three times, and it was not do you believe. It was do you love me. He asked it of the man who had followed at a distance, and He asked it after the meal and not before it, and each time Peter said yes He gave him something to do. Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep. He was not testing the belief. He was closing the gap and then handing Peter his life back with the gap closed.
That is what is happening in this room. You are not being audited on your theology, and you would pass anyway. You are being asked the nearer question, and the One asking it lit the fire. His word says draw near and He is already near, and His Spirit is the warmth you can feel from where you are standing before you have moved a foot. Nobody on that beach was interviewed. They were fed.
And here is the thing I most want to say, because I have watched people do this to themselves. You will be tempted to turn this into a new charge: I believed it all and I stayed away, and that is worse than not believing. It is not worse. It is not a category the Bible has. Peter did it and Jesus made him breakfast. Your belief was real, and it kept you within sight of the fire, and that is not nothing. It is where the walk back is shortest.
Here is what turns in this room. You thought the distance was a problem to be explained before it could be closed, and that is why it stayed open: nobody can explain a drift with no story in it, so the explaining never got finished and the walk never got started. But the gap between believing it and living near it is not closed by an explanation. It is closed by a fire somebody else lit. You have a Lord who came to the shore, and the written word says He came before anyone in the boat had recognized Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns come and have breakfast from a line you could recite into a voice you can hear.
So the reading you did without looking down is not evidence against you. It is evidence that the words are in you. And the words that are in you are His, and He is nearer to you than the lectern was, and He is not asking you to explain the lane. He is asking you to eat.
Declare this over yourself
Now say these, and say them to Him. Christ in you is your standing to speak, and it did not lapse while you were at a distance; the deeds to that house were never in your name to lose. Scripture is the ground under each line and the Holy Spirit is the warmth in them, not the accuracy of your recitation. Peter did not explain the courtyard on the beach; he ate, and then he answered a question about love. What He does with the days after this, when it feels near and when it does not, He does at His timing, and the outcome is His.
- Reading I did without looking down, you are true, every word of you, and you were never the problem. Scripture says love never ends, and the One who wrote you is nearer to me than that lectern was.
- Habit of hiding behind what I believe, you have kept the distance polite and you do not get to keep it. It is written that Peter followed at a distance (Luke 22:54) and Jesus lit the fire on the beach anyway; the Holy Spirit is the one drawing me up the sand, and I say so in the name of Jesus.
- Lord, You have brought me near, as it is written, and the bringing was Yours before it was ever my walking. I thank You, because Your Spirit does not ask me to explain the lane, and I say one true thing to You now instead of sixty lines: I am Yours, and I am here.
John 21:12
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