Six Chairs and a Padlock

The padlock is new. That is the detail that gets her, standing there in the wet with a folding chair under one arm: it is not the old brass one that always stuck, it is a new one, bought on purpose, this week.

Six of them under the awning outside the side door. Somebody has brought a flask and it is being poured into the little cup and passed along, and the rain is doing the thing where it comes off the guttering in one place in a rope. A man in his seventies who has walked from the bus keeps saying it is no bother, it is no bother, in the way people do when it plainly was.

Third time. The first time the hall had been double booked, which happens. The second time there was a thing about the insurance. This time there is a new padlock and a message that says the committee has decided to review usage, and no reply since Friday.

She is the one who organized it. So she is the one standing slightly apart, holding her phone at the angle people hold phones when they are not really reading anything, doing the arithmetic that anybody in her position does. Every route she tries closes. And more than that, and this is the part she has not said out loud to anyone: nearly every time, it is a person who closes it. Somebody decided. Somebody with a key.

You know this feeling from somewhere of your own. Maybe not a hall. A form that keeps coming back, a name that never gets forwarded, a door that opened once and then did not, a phone call that would take four minutes and never happens. And you have started, quietly, to read it as information about yourself. Not bitterly. Just as a settled conclusion, the way you know your own shoe size.

Whose door it is

The first thing to move is not the padlock. It is the sentence that has been running underneath the padlock, and the sentence is: my way through is shut.

Look at how much that little word is carrying. My way. Because when the door in front of us is our route, our plan, our idea of how the good thing arrives, then a lock on it is a verdict on the whole enterprise and, sooner or later, on us.

Here is what John writes to a small, tired, unimpressive church in a city that could out-muscle them without noticing.

Behold, I have set before you an open door, which no one is able to shut. I know that you have but little power, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.Revelation 3:8

Read who is doing what. He sets. He opens. The door in that sentence is not something anybody built, applied for, or earned a place at. It is set, by Him, in front of people He has just described as having very little strength left, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps a letter like that current.

You are standing in front of a door that was placed rather than won, and the placing was done by the One who holds the key. That is what the written word actually says, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old letter to a small church land on a wet Wednesday outside a locked hall.

And here is the load-bearing thing, the sentence this whole site is built on, and it is not a disclaimer at the end of something more exciting. The purpose that cannot be stopped is God's. It is not yours, and it never ran on your momentum. What keeps going when you have stopped is Him, and that is not a smaller comfort than the other kind; it is the only kind that survives a third padlock.

What a locked door is and is not

Let us be exact, because vagueness here does damage.

A locked door is a locked door. It is not a message from God about your worth, it is not a test you are being marked on, and it is not evidence of anything about your faith. Somebody made a decision. People do. And some of the doors that closed on you were closed by illness, by money, by a body that would not keep up, by a system, by nothing anybody chose.

You have not failed by being stopped, and nothing about your standing with God moved when the lock went on. Scripture says He knows the works and names the little strength in the same breath as the open door, and the Holy Spirit does not carry to a person a verdict God never issued.

I am not going to prosecute the committee, either, and I would ask you not to spend tonight doing it. Not because they were right. Because a case against a person, however well made, is a thing you carry, and you would be carrying it instead of the flask. The one who shut the side door does not hold the key to what God is doing with you, and treating them as though they did is the only way they ever could.

And I will not promise you that this particular door opens. I do not know that, nobody does, and a promise like that is not mine to hand out. What I can tell you is what is written: there is a door He set, no one can shut it, and it is not the one you keep staring at, because that one demonstrably can be shut, by a man with a receipt for a padlock.

Little strength is in the sentence on purpose

Do not skip over that phrase. It is the tenderest thing in the verse.

He does not say: I have set an open door before you, so summon yourselves. He says: I know that you have but little power. He names the depletion, out loud, in writing, to the whole church, and then places the door anyway.

Which means the door is not sized to what you can still manage. It was never keyed to your capacity. You were given an open door by a God who had already taken an accurate account of how little you have left. That is written down where anybody can read it, and His Spirit is the one who makes an accurate account feel like kindness rather than exposure.

So there is nothing here asking you to try again, and I am not going to ask you to. No resolution. No fresh attempt to organize. If you want to put the chairs in the boot and go home and not think about halls for a while, go, and nothing in your standing with God alters on the way.