The Impression Everybody Laughed At

It was Thursday, it lasted about eleven seconds, and he has thought about it perhaps two hundred times since.

Somebody in the kitchen did an impression. Not of him. Of a preacher on the television, hand raised, voice sliding up at the end of every line. It was, and this is the difficult part, genuinely funny. The timing was good.

And he laughed. Properly, out loud, with the rest of them, and one beat later he heard himself doing it.

Nobody in that kitchen has thought about it since. Nobody meant anything by it. The man who did the impression would be horrified to know it mattered, and he did not aim it at anybody.

But our reader has been carrying it for five days, because in his own mind he did not simply laugh at a piece of mimicry. He put something down for eleven seconds so he would not be the one person in the room with a face on. And he has not been able to shake the sense that he sold something cheap.

That is your kitchen. That is your eleven seconds. And I want to get underneath it, because there is a verse that goes straight to what you are afraid you did.

What did not move on Thursday

Paul writes a short compressed piece to Timothy, four lines of a hymn, and the last line is one of the strongest sentences in the New Testament.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

He cannot deny himself.

Read the first half properly, because it is unusually blunt. It does not say if we struggle. It says if we believe not, which is a good deal further down than laughing in a kitchen. And the response to that is not a warning. It is yet he abideth faithful, followed by the reason, which is not about us at all: His faithfulness is anchored in His own nature, so withdrawing it would require Him to stop being Himself.

You have a standing that did not shift on Thursday. Not because it was a small thing, but because it was never resting on your composure. The written word roots His faithfulness in His own character rather than in your performance in a kitchen, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man who has replayed eleven seconds two hundred times.

Now let me say something about the man who did the impression, because you have started to hold something against him and it is not his.

He was doing a television preacher. He was not doing you, and he was not doing God, and if you had told him on Friday that it had cost you five days he would have been genuinely sorry. He is not your opponent. He is a man who is good at voices.

You have no enemy in that kitchen. The written word never asks you to sort a room into sides in order to stand in it. The Holy Spirit loves the man who did the impression exactly as much as He loves you.

And now the thing you are actually afraid of, which is not the laugh.

You are afraid the laugh revealed something: that when it costs anything at all, even a slightly awkward second, you will go quiet. That the eleven seconds was a sample of you.

It was a sample of a man caught off guard in a kitchen, and it is not the whole man, and it is certainly not the ground you are standing on.

You are not held up by your own steadiness. He abideth faithful, and the abiding is His activity while yours wobbles. The Holy Spirit did not leave the room at the moment you laughed, and He was not embarrassed by you.