Out During The Last Song

Wendell sits at the end of the back pew, on the aisle, on the left, and he has sat there for thirty one years.

It is not a superstition and it is not a claim on the seat. If somebody is in it he sits one along and it does not bother him. It is only that the end of the back pew on the left is nine steps from the door, and he counted once, years ago, and has never had to count again.

Sunday evening service. The lamps are on down the sides because the chapel gets dark early even in June, and the light is that soft yellow that makes the varnish on the pew ends look like syrup. There are maybe forty people. Ruby Estep is at the piano, as she has been since before Wendell started coming, and she plays the last verse of everything a little slower than it is written, which everybody has decided to like.

He knows the shape of the evening exactly. The announcements. The two hymns. The message, which tonight is about being a city on a hill. The prayer. Then Ruby's hands go to the keys for the closing song, and there is a rustle as forty people stand.

And on the second line of it, Wendell picks up his hymn book, sets it in the rack, and goes out the door.

He does it every week. He has done it for thirty one years. By the time the song ends he is in the gravel lot with the door of the truck open, and the singing comes out through the vestibule sounding far away and warm, like something happening in a house you are walking past.

If you asked him why, he would say he likes to get out ahead of the traffic, which is a joke, because there are eleven vehicles in that lot and one road.

The real reason is the line at the door. The shaking of hands. Somebody asking how he has been and meaning it, and the half second where he has to decide what to say, and then the way a man's face changes when you tell him fine.

There was a stretch about eleven years ago when things at home were as bad as they got, and he came every single Sunday evening of it and sat in that seat and left during the last song, and not one person in that room knew a thing about it. He would tell you that is the way he wanted it, and he would be telling the truth.

But there is another thing under that one, and he has never turned it over in the light.

He thinks that if the door line ever got him, if he ever stood still long enough for somebody to really look, they would find out he is not much. Thirty one years in the back row is a long time to be relieved that nobody has checked.

Ruby is on the second line. He picks up the hymn book. Nine steps.

Out in the lot the gravel is still holding the day's heat, and above the ridge the sky is going the color of a peach.

Read who the light is in that sentence

There is a verse at the end of the night conversation with Nicodemus that has been used on people like you in a way it was never built for.

But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.John 3:21

Notice first that the whole conversation is happening at night, in private, at the request of a man who did not want to be seen coming. Jesus does not once tell him to come back in the daytime.

Now read the sentence itself and ask the plain question. What is the light in it?

It is not a room. It is not a congregation. It is not the front three rows or the line at the door or the moment somebody asks how you have been and means it. In this gospel the light is a Person, and He is the one talking, and He has been the light since the fourth verse of chapter one.

Coming to the light in John 3 means coming to Him. That is the whole of the movement being described. It is not a seating chart.

You are already the one who came, and you did it in the dark like Nicodemus, and He did not send you back to do it properly. John 3:21 says it plainly enough that nobody has to raise a voice about it, and the Holy Spirit does not need a microphone to say it again over a man standing in a gravel lot with the truck door open.

And look at the last clause, because that is where the whole verse turns. That they are wrought in God. The point of anything being made manifest is not that people get a good look at you. The point is that it becomes visible whose work it was. The seeing is not aimed at you at all. It is aimed past you, at Him.

Being seen is not the same as being on display

Somewhere along the line the two got welded together, and it has cost a lot of quiet people a lot of years.

Being on display costs something every time. It costs the half second at the door. It costs deciding what to say about eleven years ago. It costs standing still while somebody's face changes.

Being seen by God costs nothing, and it already happened, and there was no line to stand in.

He saw the eleven years. He saw every Sunday evening of it and He saw the man who came anyway and sat nine steps from the door. Nobody in the room knew, and that was not a failure of the room and it was not cowardice in the man. It was a private thing that was privately witnessed by the only witness whose seeing has any weight in it.

You have been seen the whole time, by the One whose looking has never once cost you anything. Scripture closed that question a long time ago, and what the Holy Spirit adds is that it is about you, in the actual seat you are actually in, on the aisle, on the left.

Let me be plain about the thing I am not saying, because you have heard the other version and you are braced for it.

I am not telling you to sit further forward. I am not telling you to stay for the last song, or to stand in the line, or to say something true to somebody at the door next week. There is no step here. If you have real reasons for keeping the back row, and most people who keep it do, those reasons are yours and they are honored, and nothing in this article is going to pick at them.

You were never hiding from Him, and the back row was never a wall. Take that from John 3:21 and not from my kindness, and the same Spirit who moved John's hand to write it is in the chapel and out in the parking lot both, and He has not treated the two rooms differently.