Behind The Tallest Person I Could Find

Dennis gets to the choir room at twenty past eight, and it is not to warm up.

It is because the risers sort themselves out in the first ten minutes, and after that the spots are taken, and there is one spot in that room he needs. Back row, house left, directly behind Wendell.

Wendell is six foot five and built like a door. Wendell has been singing bass in that choir since before Dennis came back, and Wendell has never once, in nine years, turned around and asked why Dennis always ends up behind him. Dennis has been quietly grateful for that for nine years too.

He knows the sight lines the way a man knows his own street.

From the front six pews, the back row is mostly hidden by the second row's shoulders. From the middle, you can see the back row fine, but not the two feet directly behind Wendell. From the balcony you can see everybody, which is why the balcony is not somewhere Dennis looks. The camera on the balcony rail sweeps left to right at the top of the second song and comes back right to left before the bridge, and he has known that timing for years without ever deciding to learn it.

He is not hiding from the singing. That part is important. He sings all the way out back there, full voice, and he loves it, and on a good Sunday when the harmony locks in on the third verse there is nowhere in the county he would rather be standing.

It is the being looked at.

Nine years ago his mother's funeral was in that room. He stood at the front of it and read the twenty-third Psalm off a folded piece of paper with four hundred people looking at him, and he got through it, and everybody said afterward how well he did. And ever since then, the front of that room has a particular taste to it that he cannot get off his tongue, and he has never told a soul that, because it sounds like nothing when you say it out loud.

So: back row, behind Wendell, every single Sunday, for nine years.

After the second service his niece Bree finds him in the hallway, holding up her phone. The church posted the photo from Easter, the wide one, the whole choir on the risers in the good light.

"Uncle Dennis, you're not in it."

He takes the phone and looks. "I'm in it."

"Where?"

He points at the back row, at a shoulder and a quarter of a face and about two inches of gray hair, all of it to the left of a very large man in a blue robe.

Bree looks at it for a second. "That's not being in it," she says, not unkindly, and then somebody calls her and she is gone down the hall.

Dennis stands there a minute longer with his own car keys in his hand.

Read the verse again and see whose hands are in it

The line that gets quoted at people like you is a line about lamps, and almost everybody reads it as though the lamp is the one being addressed.

It is not.

No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, he puts it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light.Luke 8:16

Go through it and mark every verb, then ask who is doing them. Lights. Hides. Puts. Puts. Every one of them belongs to the person holding the match. Not one belongs to the lamp.

The lamp does not climb onto the stand. The lamp is not asked its opinion about the jar. The lamp is not lectured about the bed. The whole sentence is a statement about the habits of whoever is lighting things in that house, and the habit is this: he does not light a lamp in order to put it away.

You are already set where He set you, and the setting was never something you were supposed to arrange for yourself. Luke 8:16 hands every verb in it to the one holding the match, and that is written down and it has stood there for two thousand years, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked a lamp to climb anything.

Now look at the last clause, because it is careful in a way people rush past. So that those who come in can see the light.

The light. Not the lamp.

You have a light that a room sees by, and a room has never once had to look at the lamp in order to be lit by it. Luke 8:16 says plainly what the ones coming in see, and it is not you; and the Spirit is not standing at the back of that sanctuary counting how many faces turned toward the risers.

A lampstand is not a stage

The word we translate as stand is a piece of furniture.

In a one-room house it was a shelf, or a bracket, or a wooden stem about so high, and the entire reason it existed was practical. You put the lamp up off the floor so nobody kicks it over and so the light gets across the room instead of pooling around a table leg. It is furniture. It is not a platform, there is no spotlight anywhere near it, and nobody in the history of that house ever gathered around to look at the lampstand.

So being set on it is not exposure. It is placement, and it was done by somebody else, and it was done for the sake of the room and not for the sake of the view.

I want to be very plain with you about something, because this verse gets used as a crowbar and I am not going to use it that way.

Nothing here is telling you to move forward one riser. Nothing here says the back row is a spiritual problem. Some people have real, sound, honorable reasons for staying out of a camera's path, and I am not going to sit here and reclassify those reasons as fear so that a nice sentence about lamps can end with a nudge.

You have every right to stand on the back row behind a man who is six foot five, and there is not one word in that verse that corrects you for it. Scripture puts the placing in God's hands and says nothing at all about a lamp choosing a better angle, and the same Spirit who lit it has no complaint about where the risers put you.

And notice what hidden actually means in that sentence, because it is not what you have been doing.

The jar and the bed are not modesty. They are a lid. A covered oil lamp is a lamp starved of air, and it goes out, and that is the whole point of the picture: the thing Jesus says nobody does is snuff a lamp they just went to the trouble of lighting.

Standing behind Wendell is not a lid. Nine years back there and the harmony still locks on the third verse and Dennis is still singing full out and the room is still full of it.

You are lit whether the camera on the balcony rail finds you or not, and being unlooked at has never been the same thing as being covered. Luke 8:16 uses hiding for a lamp that has been put out, which is written and is a completely different act, and the Spirit who lit you is not up in the balcony measuring sight lines.