You Did Not Leave Him in the Stairwell

Eight forty-seven on a Monday, and she is standing on the half landing between the second floor and the third, which is not a place anybody stands.

There is a vending machine on that landing that hums in a key nobody has ever identified, and a scuff along the wall at shoulder height where four hundred lanyards have gone past it. She has her own lanyard in her hand instead of round her neck, and she is turning it over and over, and she is not tired, and she is not frightened, and she could not tell you what she is.

She prayed on the bus. She prays on the bus every morning and it is real, it is not a routine, it is honestly the best twenty minutes of her day. It goes all the way to the corner of the building. And then somewhere between the revolving door and this landing it stops. Not with a bang. It just quietly runs out, the way a song ends when the shop doors close behind you.

Six years she has worked here, and nobody has ever been unkind to her about it. Nobody has ever asked. That is the strange part: there is nothing to fight and nobody to forgive, and still she stands on this landing for a minute every Monday, holding a plastic card.

You know this landing. Maybe yours is a car park, or a corridor, or the ninety seconds between the staff room and the floor. And you have never said the thing out loud because it sounds ridiculous the moment you say it: it feels like there is nowhere in that building to put the biggest thing about you. So you fold it small. You leave it by the vending machine, and you pick it up again at half five on your way out.

What Moses could not do with his own arms

Let us name the weight properly, because you have been carrying it unnamed for six years, and an unnamed weight is always heavier.

It is not persecution. Nobody laughed at you and nobody reported you. You do not have a story of being mistreated, and the absence of one has made it worse, because a story would at least be a thing to hold. What you have instead is arithmetic. You are one of forty, and nothing on that floor was built with you in mind or against you either. The building is simply indifferent, and indifference is a quieter weather than hostility. It wears you down slower, and further.

You are not carrying this alone on that landing. Not one of forty and nothing else. The written word never leaves a believer to hold their own standing up by effort, and the Holy Spirit has been on that half landing with you every Monday for six years.

So you have learned to arrive as two people: the one who prayed on the bus, and the one who logs in. You would never deny the first one if anybody asked. But you have got very good at keeping them in separate rooms, and the cost of that is a small daily tiredness you stopped attributing to anything years ago.

Now. I want to show you a hill.

There is a battle down in the valley in Exodus 17, and Moses is not in it. He is up the hill with the rod of God in his hands, and while his hands are up Israel prevails, and when they come down Amalek does. Then comes one of the most human sentences in the book: his hands got heavy.

But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.Exodus 17:12

Read what actually made them steady.

Not his arms. Not his resolve. Not how badly he wanted that battle won. A stone underneath him, and two men, one on each side, holding him up. The most famous steadiness in the Old Testament was three men and a rock.

And here is the beautiful thing about that word, steady. It comes off the same root as the word you say at the end of a prayer. Amen does not mean I agree with that. It means it holds, it is firm, it will carry the load. It is the word for a pillar. Which tells you that faith, in Scripture's own vocabulary, was never mainly a feeling you have to generate on a landing in front of a fire door. It is firmness under load, and the firmness in that verse was not something Moses had. It was something being done to him while he sat on a stone.

You are being held steady rather than holding yourself steady. The written word puts the firmness in the stone and the two men and not in the arms, and the Holy Spirit is the One doing that work in you before you reach the third floor.

Now feel where that lands at eight forty-seven on a Monday.

You have been trying to hold your own arms up. You have been treating who you are as luggage: something heavy, carried in, kept from getting noticed, set down when your arms give out at the third floor. It is not luggage. You are not the one doing the carrying. You are the one being carried.

You are carried into that building rather than smuggling anything in. The written word says Christ in you, which is a location and not a mood, and the Holy Spirit crossed the revolving door in the same body that badged in.

Paul wrote the plainest sentence in the New Testament about this to people in a pagan port city where nothing outside their own front doors agreed with them: Christ in you, the hope of glory. Not Christ near you. Not Christ available at weekends, in approved buildings, among people who use the same words. In you. Which means through the revolving door, past the vending machine, onto the floor, into the meeting, in the same body that badges in.

And this is not a thing that used to be true for other people in another century. Jesus said if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you shall say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it shall move. He put the speaking into the hands of ordinary people and never once attached it to a venue. The authority to say something true out loud over your own morning is not being held in reserve for a sanctuary. It is yours where you are standing, on a half landing that smells faintly of somebody's toast.

You are not smuggling Him in. He is already inside.

You have the authority to speak over your own morning where you stand. The written word attaches the speaking to faith rather than to a venue, and the Holy Spirit makes it live on a landing that smells faintly of somebody's toast.