The Coat Across My Knees

The chairs are bolted together in rows of four and he takes the end one, by the pillar, because from there he can see the door.

His coat goes across his knees. It will not stay on the back of the chair, it slides straight off, and he learned that the first time and has done it this way ever since.

The folder is on top of the coat. Everything in it is in order, because he is the kind of man who keeps a folder in order, and because doing it properly is one of the few things left that is entirely up to him. Two courses in there. The first one after the works shut. The second one this year, finished, done, attended every session, and nothing behind it since.

He is fifty-eight. He does not say that out loud anywhere any more, though everyone in the room can see it well enough.

Before the second course started he prayed on the landing at home, with his hand on the banister, in plain words, on his own. He asked for one door. Not a career and not a change of life. One door.

A woman calls a name and it is not his. The man two seats along has headphones in. Somebody's child is turning a chair round and round on its bracket and nobody stops him.

And here is the honest report on the praying, which he has never said out loud to another human being: nothing came. Not a no. Not a wait. Nothing at all, and the quiet has been the same quiet for a long time now.

And you know that quiet, or you would not have opened this.

Nothing came, and that is the right word for it

I am not going to rename it for you.

Somebody will tell you it was an answer in disguise. Somebody else will tell you the answer was a no, which at least would be something, and something is not what you got. What you got was quiet, and quiet is its own word, and it does not need to be upgraded before it is allowed in a conversation about God.

Here is what I will not do in this article. I will not explain the silence to you. I will not assign it a purpose, or tell you what it is developing in you, or hand you the reason, because a reason handed over in a waiting room is nearly always for the comfort of the one handing it.

So let me put down the only thing I am actually sure of, and it is enough to be going on with. You are not out of favor and you have not been set aside, and the quiet you are sitting in is not a decision that was taken about you. That is not my reassurance, and I would not offer you mine. Psalm 22:2 has a man crying out in the daytime and not being heard, and God left that line standing in His own book rather than editing it out, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it there for every reader since who needed to know that the sentence exists.

Read who said it, and then read who said it again later. Those words were on the lips of Jesus Christ at the worst hour there has ever been. The cry that gets no reply has been inside the mouth of the Son of God, and it did not disqualify Him from anything.

The verdict underneath the quiet

The silence is hard. The thing under the silence is harder, and it is the part nobody says out loud in a room with bolted chairs.

It is the conclusion. Somewhere in the last few years a sentence formed, quietly, without ever being decided on: that other people get doors and you do not, and that there must be a reason for that, and that the reason is probably you.

I want to take that apart carefully rather than shout at it, because it did not arrive as a lie. It arrived as arithmetic. You asked. Nothing came. You did what you were told to do, twice, and did it properly. The mind is a good accountant and it will always look for the entry that explains the balance, and when it cannot find one on the page it will write your own name in.

That entry is a forgery. You are not disqualified, and there is nothing you failed to do that opened this quiet, because His nearness was never a payment you could fall behind on. Scripture has Him saying He will never leave and never forsake (Hebrews 13:5), and that was written to people who had lost property and had no idea what was coming next, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that sentence a present fact in a waiting room rather than a nice line in a card.

Nobody in that room can see what you are actually carrying, and neither can the arithmetic.

Presence is not a payment

Here is where I get plain, because this is the thing I know.

Everything in your week runs on earning. Hours earn money. Courses earn certificates. Attendance earns a mark on a system somewhere. You have lived in that logic so long that it has quietly become the logic you use about God, and the moment nothing comes back, the logic says you must have underpaid.

His nearness does not run on that. It never did. You have His presence right now, in that row of chairs, and you did not buy it, which is precisely why the quiet cannot repossess it. The written word says nothing at all in creation can separate a person from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38 and 39), and the Holy Spirit who lives in you is the deposit and the proof of it, not a reward held back pending performance.

You cannot underpay a thing that was never invoiced. Sit with that for a second, because it is the whole difference between a God you are behind with and a God who is beside you.

And if this has come to real danger, a home going or a family going without food, then reach for the help that exists and reach for it today with no shame attached to the reaching. That is not faith failing. Faith has hands. Using them is what they are for.