The Desk Where You Went Quiet

She is at her desk before the lights come fully up, which is when the office is at its best and nobody else seems to know it.

The long window. The radiators ticking. Her coat over the back of the chair instead of on the hook, because the hook is by the printer and the printer is where people talk.

She has worked here five years. If you asked the floor about her they would say she is lovely, and quiet, and very good at what she does, and they would mean every word of it kindly.

But she was not quiet before this. That is the part that has started to unsettle her.

She used to be the one who said the thing. Somewhere in five years she stopped, one small silence at a time, and none of them was a decision. A meeting where she had a thought and the moment passed. A lunch where the conversation was about a program she does not watch. A Christmas where somebody said something about religion in a light way and she laughed along instead of saying anything, and then thought about it in the car for forty minutes.

And now she sits down on Monday and wonders, in a way that frightens her slightly: is the quiet one who I am now, or is the real one still in here somewhere?

That is your desk. That is your Monday. And I want to reach you before the computer wakes, because there is a much better word for where you have gone than the word you have been using.

Hidden is not the same as lost

You have been using the word lost. Paul uses a completely different one, and the difference is not a comfort trick. It is a fact about where a life is kept.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

Hid. Not gone, not misplaced, not fading. Hidden, which is what somebody does deliberately with a thing they value, in a place they have chosen, for keeping.

And look where the hiding place is: inside Christ, and Christ inside God. Two walls. There is no version of an open-plan office, however loud, that reaches through that.

You are hidden and not lost. The written word puts your life in a kept place rather than a lost one, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a present comfort in a woman at a desk on a Monday morning rather than a doctrine she agrees with and cannot feel. Nothing about you has been going out. It has been going deeper in.

Now let me say something kind about the five years of silences, because you have been quietly prosecuting yourself for them.

Not one of those silences was a betrayal. A meeting where the moment passed is a meeting. A lunch about a program you do not watch is a lunch. Laughing along in a light moment at Christmas is what a person does who does not want to make a colleague feel foolish, and it is nearer to kindness than to cowardice.

You are not a woman who denied anything. The written word does not describe a hidden life as a compromised one; it describes it as a safe one. The Holy Spirit does not read your quiet as a verdict on your faith, and He was not standing at the printer waiting for you to say something.

And there is something in the early mornings worth naming, because you have never counted it.

You come in before the lights. You like the ticking radiators and the long window. That is not nothing: it is a woman who has quietly kept one part of the day for herself and for God, five days a week, for five years, without ever calling it a practice. Nobody assigned it. You have been meeting Him at a desk before the floor fills, and you did not even give it a name.

You have been in company all along. Hid with Christ, says the written word, and with is the whole warmth of it: it is not a locker, it is a companionship. The Holy Spirit has been in those early hours with you, in the best part of the office, which you were right about.