The Room You Have Been Driving Past

The midweek group meets in the side room, the one with the stacking chairs and the serving hatch through to the kitchen and the urn that takes twenty minutes to come to the boil.

She did the tea in that room for eleven years. It was not a job anybody voted on. She came early, filled the urn, set the cups out in rows of six, and brought the good biscuits from her own cupboard because the ones in the tin had been in the tin since Easter.

Then the leader printed a rota. A proper one, with boxes and dates and names typed into the boxes, and it went up on the pin board in the corridor on the first Sunday in September. She read it standing in the corridor with her coat still on. Her name was not on it. Eleven years of Wednesdays, and the tea had gone to a couple who had been coming since May, and there was no spite in it anywhere, and nobody had thought about it for longer than it took to type.

She said a rota was a lovely idea, and she meant it, mostly. She went in and sat in the second row where she always sat and did not hear a word of the study. She washed up afterwards anyway, because the couple left early, and she drove home with the radio off.

The next Wednesday she had a headache. The one after that her sister rang, which was true, and the call could have waited, which was also true. By November she had stopped needing a reason.

That was two years ago in September. She still drives past on Wednesday evenings and she goes the long way, past the chip shop, so as to come at the hall from the side where the side-room window is out of sight at twenty past seven. Somebody from the group messaged her in the spring. She read it four times over two days and answered it warmly and said things had been busy.

And the word you have used the whole time, to your husband and to your own face in the mirror, is break. You are having a break from it. A break is a fine word. It has a beginning and it has an end, and yours has had a beginning for two years.

You know exactly which Wednesday it stopped being a break. You have never once said the word slight out loud to another living soul, because saying it would mean it mattered, and you are not the sort of woman who lets a rota matter.

Two years of calling it a break

Let me say the plain thing first, because plain is what I have.

It was not pride that kept the going back at bay. It was soreness, and sore and proud look identical from the outside, which is why nobody came and got you. And the reason it went on for two years rather than two weeks is that the first fortnight cost you nothing and every week after that added a small charge to the going back. Week three, you would have had to say something. Month six, somebody would have asked. Two years in, walking through that door means walking in front of a room full of people who all know the sum of your absence, and the arithmetic of that is unbearable, so you take the long way round past the chip shop instead.

Here is the thing I want to put in your hands before anything else, and it is not a technique.

You are not on probation, and there is no hearing scheduled. Scripture does not describe a God who audits an absence before He receives a person back, and Jeremiah records Him saying He drew with lovingkindness, which is not the vocabulary of a disciplinary process. It is the Holy Spirit and not this paragraph who makes that land on a woman parked forty yards from a lit window.

Now hear what turning actually is in Scripture, because the word has been dressed in the wrong clothes for most of your life. It is not an emotion you have to produce first. It is not a performance of sufficient sorrow. It is direction. A body facing one way, and then facing another way. That is the whole of it. Everything else that gets attached to it, the flinching, the rehearsed apology, the private list of what you should have done differently, is decoration, and most of the decoration was hung there by shame rather than by God.

Look at what actually draws.

The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Read the order of that sentence, because it is doing all the work. The love comes first, it is described as everlasting, and the drawing is the consequence of it. Not the reward for it. The kindness is the rope. There is no version of that verse in which fear is the engine and kindness is the prize at the end, and every time somebody has tried to run it the other way round they have produced a congregation of frightened people who are very good at attendance.

You were drawn here, and the drawing was kindness the whole way. That is written, and it was written about a nation that had genuinely walked off, which is more than a rota and less than a disqualification, and the Spirit who carried that sentence to them is the same Spirit reading it over you now.

Kindness is what does the turning

There is a second thing under this, and it is the one that keeps women like you in the car park.

The slight was real. I am not going to tidy it up for you or explain the leader's side or tell you it was not meant that way, because you already know it was not meant that way, and knowing it was not meant that way is precisely what left you with nowhere to put it. An unmeant wound has no address. There is nobody to be angry at and nothing to forgive that anybody would recognize, so it goes inward, and inward it turns into a much worse sentence than the rota ever was.

And that sentence has no right to stay in your house. Scripture says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and He is named there as near rather than as disappointed, and the Holy Spirit does not agree with the private verdict you passed on yourself in a corridor with your coat on.

Say the verdict out loud, because it will not survive the daylight. It goes something like this: I am the sort of person who can be left off a list, and nobody noticed I was gone, and that is the truth about me that eleven years of urns was covering up.

You have not been struck off anything. Scripture is explicit that the gifts and the calling of God come without repentance on His side, and no rota in any corridor in the world has jurisdiction over that, and it is His Spirit who keeps that true on a Wednesday when nobody says it to you.

Which brings us to the door itself.

You are not required to arrive with a speech. The written word shows a father who ran while the prepared apology was still only half said, and the running started before the speech finished, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a welcome rather than a nice story about somebody else's family.