The Empty Floor At Ten To Six

The vacuum has a note it settles into, and by the second aisle of desks she has stopped hearing it.

Ninth floor, ten to six. The strip lights are on over the far end only, because the sensors down this side have not been tripped yet, and the windows are still black with the city standing in them.

She likes this hour, or she used to. Nobody asks her anything at ten to six. Nobody steps aside for her with that small apologetic face. The floor is hers for another seventy minutes, and then it belongs to people with lanyards.

She has been asking God about the same thing since the year her hours were cut. Four winters of it now. She has asked in a bus shelter, at the sink, in the back row on a Sunday, and here on the ninth floor more often than anywhere, out loud, because there is nobody in the building to hear her do it.

She says it again this morning, into a room with two hundred empty chairs in it.

And nothing comes back. Not a no. Not a wait. Nothing at all, the way nothing has come back for four winters, and the same date comes round on the calendar the way it always has.

She switches the machine off and stands there a moment in the hum of the building, and she thinks the thought she has never once said out loud to anybody: maybe I have been talking to a ceiling.

If you have thought that, I am not going to flinch at it and I am not going to explain it away. Stay on the floor with me a minute.

I keep the watch from three until six

I am usually awake at the hour you are reading about. The third watch runs into the fourth, and I have spent a great deal of my life in buildings between three and six, walking plant rooms and listening to systems that only speak when everybody else has stopped.

So let me tell you the first thing, and let me tell it plainly. I do not know why this has not been answered. Nobody on this earth has been handed that, and anybody who offers you a reason for it has invented one on your doorstep. I will not do that to you, and I would ask you not to accept it from anyone who tries.

What I will do is refuse to let a silence be read as a sentence, because that is where the real damage gets done. You are not disqualified. Nothing you did closed a door and nothing you left unsaid would have opened one, because Scripture puts your standing before God on what Christ has done and never once on the reply rate of your prayers, and the Spirit who lives in you did not go quiet because heaven did.

The psalm that ends in the dark

There are one hundred and fifty psalms in the book and one of them never comes right.

O Lord, God of my salvation, I have cried out day and night before You.Psalm 88:1

Read the rest of it some morning when you feel able to. It goes down, and then it keeps going down. The man writing says he is counted with those who go into the pit, that his friends have been put far from him, that he has been afflicted from his youth. And then it stops. The last word of that psalm is darkness. No turn. No yet. No tidy final verse where the sun comes up over the hill.

Now sit with what that means. Somebody gathered the songs for the public worship of God, held that one in his hands, and put it in.

You have been handed a book that keeps a prayer with no answer in it, deliberately, permanently, at the front of the congregation. The written word did not require a resolution before it would take a man seriously, and the Holy Spirit did not go back and soften the ending so the singers would feel better about themselves. That is the God you have been talking to on the ninth floor.

Nearness is not a payment you failed to make

Here is the piece I most want you to have, and I am going to go slowly, because this is where I have watched good people take the wrong turning.

Somewhere in the second or third winter you started treating the reply as the receipt. No reply, therefore no presence. No presence, therefore something must be owing. That arithmetic is nowhere in the Bible. Romans 8:38 and 39 run a list of everything that has been tested against the possibility of separating a believer from the love of God in Christ, and the list has death in it, and life, and angels, and powers, and things present, and things to come, and height and depth and every created thing, and there is not one word in it about an unanswered request.

So take it as the finished thing it is. You are no further from God this morning than you were four winters ago, and His nearness was never a payment you failed to make. He is closer to you than the person who asks after you at the door, and that is not a mood to be worked up: it is what His word says outright, and it is what His Spirit is doing in you at ten to six whether the floor feels like anything or not.