The Word That Would Sound Strange Here

Third floor, and the lift is slow enough that he has time to think, which is the problem.

Eleven people in that office. He likes them. He has been there six years and he knows about the divorces and the sons at university and whose mother is not well, because you learn a whole street's worth of lives sitting near people for six years.

They do not know one thing about him.

Not because he hides. He has simply never found the sentence. There is no moment in an accounts office when the word God fits, and he has watched for one, and it never arrives. It would land the way a foreign coin lands in a till: not offensive, just wrong, and everyone would be polite about it and the room would be slightly different afterwards.

So he says nothing, year after year, and the lift doors open on the third floor, and he walks to his desk carrying something he has started to think of as contraband.

Last Monday the thought arrived fully formed for the first time and he has not been able to shake it since: am I sneaking Him in here?

That is your lift. That is your third floor. And I want to get to you before the doors open, because the picture in that question has you doing something you have never once had to do.

He was there before the lease was signed

There is a line in the psalms that quietly dismantles the whole idea of carrying God into a room.

I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.Psalm 16:8

Before me. Not behind, not in a bag, not tucked away. Set out in front, the way you set something where you will see it all day. And notice the second half, which is the reason the first half works: because he is at my right hand. David does not put God there. David sets his attention on a God who is already standing in that position.

You are not carrying Him in. He is not contraband in your coat. The written word says He is already at your right hand, which is to say already in the office, already at the desk, already there when the lease was signed and when the carpet was laid. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a live fact in a man in a slow lift rather than a nice idea he agrees with.

Now let me take the shame off the silence, because you have been carrying it as though it were cowardice and it is not.

There is a kind of silence that is denial. You would know. It has a particular taste and it costs something in the chest, and nothing you have described has that taste. What you have is a man who has looked honestly for a moment where a word would fit, has not found one, and has declined to force it. That is not fear. In a small office, that is courtesy, and courtesy is not the opposite of faith.

You have not denied anything in six years. The written word does not make His presence conditional on your announcing it, and the Holy Spirit does not measure a man's faith by how often his colleagues have been made uncomfortable. He has been at your right hand through every one of those silences.

And here is the thing I most want you to see, because you have been discounting it entirely.

You know about the divorces and the sons at university and whose mother is not well. Do you understand what that means? It means that for six years, in a room where nobody talks about anything real, you have been the one who remembers. People tell you things. That is not an accident of seating. That happens to particular kinds of people, and it is not a small thing, and you have never once counted it as anything to do with God.

You have been doing something quietly pastoral at that desk for six years. He is at my right hand, and a right hand is the working hand: it is the one that does things. The Holy Spirit has been at the working side of a man who listens, and the listening has been the ministry the whole time.