The Back Row Of A Building You Had Nothing To Do With

It happened in the second chorus, which is the part she could do in her sleep, and that is probably why there was room for it.

Her hands were fine. Her voice was fine. Nobody in that room noticed one thing, and two people came up afterwards and said it had been a good morning.

And for about eight bars she was not there at all.

She was somewhere else, and it was very specific, which is what has bothered her since. It was a building she had never been in. Nobody knew her. She came in four minutes late so she did not have to talk to anybody at the door. She sat in the back row, on the end, next to a radiator. She did not know a single song. She did not stand up when everybody else stood up, and nobody looked at her for not standing.

She sat there with her coat on and her hands in her lap and let it all go past her.

And when she came back into the room, into her own second chorus, with her own hands doing what they were doing, she noticed something that has been sitting on her chest for five weeks now.

It was the most restful eight bars of her year.

Not the nicest. Not the happiest. The most restful. Nothing in the last twelve months has come anywhere near it, and it was not real, and it lasted about fifteen seconds, and it happened while she was at the front of a room leading other people.

She finished the set. She smiled. She helped stack chairs. And in the car she thought: what does it mean about a person who does this, that the best fifteen seconds of her year were spent imagining being a stranger somewhere else.

She has told nobody. Everyone she would tell was in the room.

Now that is you in the second chorus, and I think you knew by the fourth line.

Nothing is going to be argued at you here

Let me say what is not about to happen on this page, because you have braced yourself for both of them.

Nobody here is going to talk you into staying. Not with encouragement, not with guilt, not with a story about somebody who nearly walked away and is so grateful now. And nobody here is going to tell you to go. That is not mine to hand you, I do not know your building or your years, and both of those are just different ways of making a very tired person carry a decision this afternoon.

There is no decision on this page. Set it down for twenty minutes. It will keep.

There is nothing to do here either. No practice to tighten, nothing to get up earlier for, no discipline to add. You are running on empty, and a suggestion is the last thing empty needs.

What I want is to take one specific weight off you, and it is this one: the idea that where your mind went for eight bars has told you something terrible about who you are.

Because somebody wrote that exact daydream down, and it is in the Bible, and it is one of the best loved songs in it.

For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.Psalm 84:10

Everybody quotes the first half of that. Look at the second half, and look at what it is actually saying, because it is not humility and it is not a poetic flourish.

He wants the smallest job in the building.

He is not asking for the platform. He is not asking to lead anything. He wants to be the person by the door, and the reason a doorkeeper is such a striking thing to want is that a doorkeeper is inside the house without being responsible for what happens in it.

That is your back row with the radiator. That is the same wish. It was written down about three thousand years ago by somebody who loved the house of God, and God kept it, and had it sung, and it has been sung ever since by people who never once thought there was anything wrong with the person who wrote it.

Wanting the smallest place in the room is not a symptom of something rotten in you, and God has never treated it as one. He put that wish into the songbook of His own people and had congregations sing it out loud (Psalm 84:10). It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes a line from a temple song and lays it over fifteen seconds in a second chorus on a Sunday morning.

Now look at the whole of that psalm for a second, because it is not the song of a person who has fallen out of love with the house.

It opens with how lovely is your dwelling place, my soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord. That is not somebody looking for the exit. That is somebody homesick for the very building he is standing in.

Which is the thing about your eight bars that you have not let yourself see. You did not imagine a beach. You did not imagine a different life or another town or a job with normal hours. You imagined a church.

Your rest and your calling are not in different directions, and the daydream that frightened you was set inside the house rather than away from it. It is written that a day in His courts is better than a thousand elsewhere, and the man who wrote it wanted the door and not the platform (Psalm 84:10). His Spirit is what makes that a comfort in a car park rather than a fact about ancient poetry.

What you wanted was not out. What you wanted was to be in that room without carrying it.

And you have never once had that. Not in twelve months. Every time you have been in a room like that in the last year, the room has been partly your responsibility, and the difference between being in a room and holding a room is enormous, and nobody ever explains that to the person holding it.

Jesus never asked you to be a person who does not need feeding, and He fed the ones who were doing the work first. It is written that when the apostles came back from being sent out and the people kept coming so that they had no leisure even to eat, He said, come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while (Mark 6:31). He took them off the work Himself. His Spirit is the one who says the same sentence over a woman five weeks later in her own kitchen.

And I need to say this next part plainly, because it matters more than anything else on this page. If any of this has traveled further than tiredness, if you have found yourself thinking that everybody would manage better without you in the world at all, please tell a human being today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line or emergency number, and one person who knows your name and will stay on the phone. Being the one at the front does not disqualify you from being the one who calls.

The verdict you have been reading over yourself in the car for five weeks has no standing, and heaven has never once recorded it. It is written that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and the word that matters in it is now. The Holy Spirit is the one who reads a sentence like that over somebody stacking chairs.