The Laugh That Went Round the Changing Room

Three seconds. Maybe four. And he has been carrying it since Tuesday.

Somebody had asked him, half seriously, why he had not come out after the last match, and he answered honestly, and the honest answer had God in it. Not a sermon. One clause. And a bloke on the far bench repeated it back in a silly voice and the laugh went round the room the way a laugh does in a room where everybody is half undressed and tired and glad the match is over.

He laughed too. Then he got his boots off and looked at the floor for a bit longer than he needed to.

It is Saturday now. He has replayed those three seconds perhaps a hundred and fifty times. He has been short with his wife twice. He did not go to training on Thursday and told himself it was his knee, and his knee is fine.

And the worst of it is that these are good men. He has known most of them eleven years. One of them sat with him in a car park for two hours the week his father died.

That is your changing room. That is your Saturday. And I want to speak to that, because there is a proverb that names exactly what has hold of you, and it does not call it weakness.

What it is called

Proverbs puts two half-lines beside each other, and the whole thing is in the contrast.

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe.Proverbs 29:25

A snare.

Not a sin to be scolded for. Not cowardice. A snare: a trap, the sort a bird walks into without noticing, which does no harm at the moment it closes and simply means the bird is no longer going where it was going.

That is what has happened to your week. Nobody attacked you. You have simply not been going where you were going since Tuesday.

And the other half is not try harder. It is whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe, where the safety is a place rather than an achievement.

You are safe in a place that room cannot enter. Not braced, not defended. The written word sets trust against the snare rather than setting courage against it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man who has replayed four seconds a hundred and fifty times.

Now let me say something about the bloke on the far bench, because five days of this have started to promote him into something he is not.

He does voices. He did one. He has done one about the way you take a throw-in and about your car, and if you told him on Monday that it had cost you a week he would be genuinely upset, and he is not a man who wants anything from you but a game of football.

You have no opponent in that room. The written word does not require somebody to be in the wrong for you to be free. The Holy Spirit is fond of that man, and He is not standing on your side of the bench against him.

And now the thing that is actually running your week, which is not the laugh.

It is Thursday. It is that you did not go, and told yourself a story about a knee, and you know the story was not true, and that is the part that has made you short with your wife.

You are not a coward, you are snared. The fear of man bringeth a snare, and a snare is something you walk into rather than something you choose. The Holy Spirit was with you on Thursday when you did not go, and He is not holding it against you now.