The Person I Left Over Left Two Years Ago

She found out in a bakery, from somebody she barely knows, in the middle of a sentence about something else.

Oh, she moved up to her daughter's, must be two years back now.

And Carine said oh right, and paid for the bread, and went out to the car and sat in it.

She is fifty. She left that church six years ago because of one person, and she has never said that out loud to a single human being, including her sister, including her husband, who thinks it was about the music.

It was not a small thing. She wants that understood. There was a run of about a year, and there were four separate occasions, and one of them was in front of other people, and Carine has gone over each of the four enough times to know exactly what was said and in what tone.

She is not being dramatic and she is not carrying a grudge she cannot justify.

She simply could not be in a room with that woman, and rather than make it anybody else's problem, she left.

And she has told herself, for six years, that the day the situation changes is the day she would think about going back.

The situation changed two years ago.

She has known for four months.

And she has done nothing at all, and this is what has been sitting on her chest since the bakery, because the reason is gone and she is still out here, which means the reason had stopped being the reason at some point and she did not notice when.

There is a version of this she can almost look at. It is that leaving cost her something enormous and she needs it to have been for a large and permanent thing, and she moved up to her daughter's is not large and permanent, it is just a house move.

If the obstacle was that ordinary, then six years is a different shape.

And you may have an obstacle that has quietly gone. And you may have found that it changed nothing.

The host sends the servants out to the corners

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

You did not waste them. You never did, and leaving a room you could not be in was a reasonable thing to do and not a failure of faith. Scripture has a host whose hall is not full and who sends people out to the places where anybody at all might be standing, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the removal of an obstacle, who brings somebody in. Set it down here in this hall. It is heavy and it has been in the car since the bakery.

Now hear it, and hear where he sends them.

So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.Matthew 22:9

Anyone you find.

There is no list at that point in the story. The original invitations have not worked out, and the host does not cancel and does not reduce the catering. He widens it.

And notice the location. Street corners, which is where people are when they are not anywhere in particular, and that is a precise description of where six years leaves somebody.

The widening was His idea and it is aimed at whoever is standing about. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who brings a person in, and He has never once made a room's population the condition of it.

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 four occasions did not happen or were less than you remember. They happened, one of them in front of people, and Scripture never asks anybody to pretend a thing was smaller than it was in order to be reconciled to it.

And nothing here says that building will be a good place for you now, or that the people who watched one of those four have any idea what to say to you. I have not met them. I will not promise you a room.

The point is narrower and it is about the four months since the bakery, and Scripture has the host widening rather than closing, and His Spirit is the one who has been standing on the corner with you.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You need it to have been for something large.

That is not vanity. Six years is a very long time and the mind does what it can to make a long thing proportionate, and finding out that the whole shape of it could be undone by somebody's daughter having a spare room is a hard thing to be handed in a bakery. His Spirit was in that car and He has never once needed the reason to be big enough.