I Sent Them and Never Went Myself

Eleven years of Sunday mornings and Sylvie can tell you the route without thinking.

Both of them in the back, coats on the seat, the shoes that were always somewhere else. Out at twenty past, there by half, and then she would drive to the end of the road and turn round and go home and do the ironing, or on the cold ones she would sit in the car and read.

She never went in. Not once, in eleven years, except for the nativity and one funeral.

She is fifty-nine.

Her son is twenty-eight and her daughter is twenty-five and both of them still go, in different towns, of their own accord, and this is the great quiet satisfaction of Sylvie's life and she has never told either of them that.

And in July, on the phone about the car insurance, her daughter said, out of nowhere, in the middle of the call: Mum, why did you never come in?

And Sylvie said: oh, somebody had to do the dinner.

Which is a real answer. There was a dinner and she did do it.

It is not the answer.

The answer is that she believed all of it, the whole way through, and she never said so to anybody including her husband, and by about year three the not having said it had become a thing in itself, and by year six she could not have gone in without it being a moment.

And Sylvie has never in her life wanted to be a moment.

So she drove to the end of the road and turned round, five hundred times, and gave her children something she was standing outside of.

And her daughter asked her in July and she said something about the dinner, and her daughter said fair enough, and they went back to the insurance.

And Sylvie put the phone down and stood in her kitchen for a while.

And you may have delivered somebody somewhere for years. And you may have been the one who never went in.

The psalm invites a person to find out for themselves

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

You are not an outsider to this. You never were, and driving somebody somewhere every week is not the same as standing outside of a thing. Scripture issues an invitation to first-hand discovery, using a sense, and it says what is found, and it is the Holy Spirit, not somebody making an entrance, who brings a person in. Set it down here in this doorway. It is heavy and it has been on the passenger seat five hundred times.

Now hear it, and hear that it is an experiment rather than an argument.

Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.Psalm 34:8

Taste and see.

Those are two senses and both of them are first-hand. Nobody tastes anything on your behalf. It cannot be delegated, reported, or arranged for somebody else in the back of a car.

And notice the second half. Takes refuge, which is a word about going in rather than about performing anything once you are there, and the blessing is attached to the going in.

The finding out is meant to be yours and it cannot be done for you. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who brings a person in, and He has never once needed anybody to make an entrance.

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 eleven years were a failure. They were not, and you did the single most effective thing a parent can do, which is put a child in the room week after week without making a speech, and Scripture has nothing but honor for that.

And nothing here says a particular building will be easy to walk into on a particular Sunday. I do not know what it is like in there now or who is at the door, and I am not going to promise you a welcome from people I have not met.

The point is narrower and it is about the tasting, and Scripture makes that first-hand on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who does the bringing in.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You believed the whole way through.

That is the thing in this article and everything else is arrangement. You have had it for eleven years and never once said it, and the silence grew until it was heavier than the saying, and none of that has ever made it less true. His Spirit is the one who put it in you before your children were born and He has never once minded that it stayed quiet.