The Watch Nobody Assigned You

The plastic chair has a split in the molding that catches the side of her leg every time she shifts, so somewhere in the third hour she stopped shifting.

Her coat is folded on the seat beside her, the seat nobody has used since half past nine. There is a paper cup on the floor by her foot with a skin across the top of the tea. Twice an hour the lift at the far end of the corridor arrives and opens, and every time she lifts her head, and every time it is somebody else's night. The radiator under the window ticks as it cools, goes quiet, and starts again. Above the double doors there is a clock whose minute hand hangs and then jumps, and she has watched it do that so many times now that she waits for the jump.

Twice tonight somebody has come through those doors, and both times her whole body was standing before her mind agreed to it, and both times it was for another family further along the row, and both times she sat back down and said sorry to nobody in particular.

The fear is not the worst of it. That surprised her somewhere in the second hour and it has kept surprising her since. The worst of it is the uselessness. There is nothing on this side of those doors for her to do: no job, no task, no way to be of the slightest help to anybody. She has been a woman who does something her whole life, and tonight the whole of what is asked of her is to sit still in a corridor at two in the morning and be no use whatsoever.

If that is your chair, and your cold tea, and your two in the morning, then the rest of this was written for you.

Waiting is a post, not a gap

Let me say the weight of it plainly before I say anything else, because you have been carrying it for hours and nobody in that building has time to name it for you.

You are frightened, and underneath the fright you are humiliated by how little you can do. You cannot fix it. You cannot help. You cannot even keep your own mind steady for ten minutes together, and every small thing your body still wants at two in the morning feels like a betrayal: you are hungry, and you are ashamed of being hungry. You want to sleep. You caught yourself thinking about work, or about the car in the pay bay, or about nothing at all, and you took it as evidence that you are not the person you thought you were.

You are not being weighed tonight. You are being kept.

You are held rather than assessed at two in the morning. Not marked down for being hungry or for thinking about the car. The written word never measures a person by the steadiness of their mind in the small hours, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping you since half past nine.

I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.Psalm 130:5-6

Look at who is in that verse. The watchmen. Men standing on a wall in the dark, whose entire job is the part where nothing happens.

A watchman does not bring the morning. He cannot pull it forward by an hour, he cannot earn it, and his standing there has never once been the reason the sky changed. And nobody in the whole of Scripture calls his hours wasted. The watch is a post. It is not the empty stretch before the real work begins. It is the work, and it is counted as service by the God who set it.

Nobody handed you a rota tonight. You did not choose this and you cannot resign it. But the thing you are calling uselessness has a name in the Word, and the name is watching, and heaven has never regarded it as time off from your life.

You are standing a post and not filling a gap. The written word puts the watchman inside the psalm without one word of apology for the hours where nothing happens, and the Holy Spirit counts what you are doing tonight as service.

Then read what the psalm says the soul is actually waiting for.

Not the morning. The Lord. My soul waits for the Lord, more than the watchmen wait for the morning. The morning is what the watchmen were straining toward, and the psalm reaches straight past it to Someone. You think you are waiting for news. Under the news, in the part of you that has gone quiet, you are waiting for God, and that is a different wait entirely, because that One is not behind the doors where you cannot follow. He came out into the corridor. He is sitting the length of the row with you and He has been there since half past nine.

I know what rises against that. Corridors are where a person stops believing in the nearness of God, not where they start. The building is bright and busy and utterly indifferent to your soul, and there is nothing holy anywhere in the fabric of it. So the thought comes: God is in a sanctuary, and I am in a hallway, and I have left His jurisdiction for the night.

He never took jurisdiction over rooms. He took people. The apostles did most of their praying in places nobody would have called sacred: borrowed upstairs rooms, roadsides, a prison at midnight with their backs in ribbons, singing because He was in there with them and not because anything had improved yet. Nothing in that has expired. There is no era in which He was present and this one is not it.

You are inside His jurisdiction in a hallway. The written word has the apostles praying in borrowed rooms and prisons rather than sanctuaries, and the Holy Spirit did not stop at the door of this building on His way in.

And it is not only the room behind those doors that He is in. That is the quiet lie a corridor tells you: that all the mercy in the building has gone through with the person you love, and you are the one left outside holding the coats. You are not a spare part in somebody else's crisis. You are His, personally, in that chair, tonight, and He is not economizing His presence in order to spend it all on one side of a wall.

You are the one being waited on as much as the one waiting. The written word reaches past the morning to a Person, so this wait has an object who is already here, and the Holy Spirit came out into the corridor and sat down the length of the row with you.