The Line Under the Fluorescent Hum

For the believer standing in a corridor at four in the morning with the old words in her mouth.

You're the only person in this corridor, and the light above you has a hum you'd never notice in daylight.

It's ten to four. You've been here since eleven. Somebody you love is behind a door with a number on it, and a nurse has told you twice that there's nothing useful to do, and you've walked to the vending machine three times without buying anything.

So you do what your mouth does when there's nothing else. You start on the old words, the ones from Sunday, under your breath.

Halfway through, you notice something that stops you completely. You aren't comforting yourself, you're checking. You're going through that sentence the way you'd go through a list of facts about a house you were considering buying: testing it, asking whether it holds.

That's not a failure of faith at four in the morning. That's the first time you've read it as a claim rather than a comfort, and the hum overhead is the only sound in the building.

You are able to hold those words as facts you're leaning on, not as a feeling you're producing. The written Word states the oldest summary as a list of events rather than a mood, and the Holy Spirit makes those events live for you in a corridor at four.

What a Corridor Does to Comfortable Words

Here's the honest difficulty, and it has nothing to do with the strength of your faith.

Most of what we've built around the old words is atmospheric. The music, the room, the candles if your tradition has them, the particular quality of a congregation's voice. All of it is good, and all of it works by producing a condition in you.

A corridor produces nothing at all. There is the hum overhead, a floor cleaner somewhere down the far end, and a chair with a rip in the seat. Every atmospheric support has been removed, and what's left is whether the sentence is true.

That's why four in the morning feels like doubt. It isn't. It's the first occasion on which the words have had to stand up with no help from the building, and you're discovering what they're made of at exactly the moment you need to.

Facts Handed Over in Order

Here's the oldest summary in the New Testament, written down as a list of events that happened:

How that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.1 Corinthians 15:3-4 (KJV)

Count what's in it. He died. He was buried. He rose on the third day. Three events, each one with a place and a time attached, none of them describing an interior state of any kind.

There's nothing in that sentence for you to feel. There's something in it for you to lean on, which is a completely different service and the only one available in a corridor.

You are holding events rather than atmosphere, and events hold weight at four in the morning. The written Word gives them as a list of facts with dates attached, and the Holy Spirit makes them present rather than historical for you now.

Checking Is What You Do With Something Load Bearing

Here's what I'd carry out of that corridor if I could take a single thing away with me.

Nobody tests a cushion, and everybody tests a rope. The checking you caught yourself doing under the hum wasn't skepticism creeping in, it was the correct way to treat something you're about to put your weight on.

We've trained each other, gently and with the best intentions, to treat the old words as a cushion. Something soft to be applied when a person is hurting. And a cushion is lovely until the night when you need to be held over a drop, and then it turns out you needed the other thing all along.

You were checking the rope. That's not a lapse. That's a woman at four in the morning doing exactly what a person does with the only thing in the building that can take her weight.

Testing the words was never doubt, it was the right way to handle a rope. The written Word gives you events to lean on rather than a mood to produce, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding the other end of it.

Nothing Here Is a Judgment on Your Feelings

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I refuse to write it.

I'm not saying the atmosphere is worthless, or that the Sundays where you felt a great deal were the shallow ones. God meets people in music, in rooms, in candlelight. He has done it for two thousand years without asking anybody's permission.

I'm also not saying these particular words are binding on anybody, or that a believer whose room has never recited a line of them is missing something. The same faith is held in a building that says them and in one that never has.

You can keep every warm Sunday and still find that the words stand up in a corridor. Scripture supplies the events without diminishing anyone's experience of them, and the Holy Spirit does the holding rather than the grading.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.