I Left During the Last Song

He had it planned before he got there, which is the part he thinks about.

Sami parked further away than he needed to. He went in four minutes after the start, which is late enough that nobody is at the door and early enough that it is not a statement. He sat in the second row from the back on the left.

And when they stood for the last one he picked up his coat and went out through the side, and he was in the car before the song finished.

That was two years and five months ago.

He is fifty-one and he had been in that building since he was twenty-six, and there was no falling out. There is a stretch of about eighteen months where things at home were extremely hard, and he stopped being able to talk to anybody, and he went from being a man who stayed for coffee to a man who did not, and then to a man who left during the song, and then to a man who did not come.

Nobody was unkind to him at any point.

Two people rang. He did not ring back, and he meant to, both times, and by the time he had worked out what he would say it had been long enough that the saying itself would have needed explaining.

That is how it works and he understands the mechanism perfectly. Understanding it has not helped once.

And what he has been certain of for about two years, so certain that it does not present itself as a thought any more, is that he would now be a stranger in there.

He can picture it exactly. The pause. Somebody's face doing the small work of placing him. The warmth, which would be real, and the questions, which would be kind, and the four seconds before anybody spoke.

He would rather not have the four seconds.

So he does not go, and he tells himself and occasionally his wife that it is complicated, and it is not complicated at all.

And you may have gone out during a song. And you may have decided since that there is a door somewhere with your name off it.

Isaiah shouts an invitation with the price removed

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it two years and it was never yours.

You are not a stranger to God. You never were, and no absence has ever made anybody one. Scripture has an invitation called out in the street with the qualifications deliberately stripped off it, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a re-introduction to a room, who brings a person in. Set it down here in this doorway. It is heavy and it has been in the car with you since.

Now hear it, and hear that it is shouted rather than offered.

Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!Isaiah 55:1

Come, all you who are thirsty.

That is the entire entry requirement and it is not an achievement. Thirst is a condition rather than a credential, and everybody who is not dead has it.

And notice the second half, which is the strangest line in the passage. You who have no money, come, buy and eat. It names the exact thing you would expect to disqualify somebody and then puts it in the invitation as the reason to come.

The invitation is His and it is not conditional on anything you can produce. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who brings a person in, and He has never once required an explanation of where they have been.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says the people in that building failed you. They did not. Two of them rang, which is two more than a lot of people get, and Scripture has nothing against a room that did not know what was happening at your house.

And nothing here promises you what will happen if you walk in on Sunday. I have no idea. That is not in my gift and I will not pretend a specific congregation will do a specific thing, because that would be a promise about people rather than about God.

The point is narrower and it is about the door you have decided is shut, and Scripture calls the invitation out with the price taken off, and His Spirit is the one who does the bringing.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You are not avoiding the room.

You are avoiding four seconds of somebody's face while they place you, and four seconds is a very small thing to have cost you two years, and naming it that small is not mockery, it is the beginning of it being manageable. His Spirit knows precisely how heavy four seconds can be and He has never once thought you soft for it.