The Word I Learned To Dread

Twenty past eight, and the room has that late warmth an auditorium gets when four hundred people have been sitting in it for an hour and a half.

Deb is nine rows back on the left, where she always sits, because the aisle seat means she can get out fast at the end without climbing over anybody's knees.

The speaker is good. She wants to be honest about that from the start, because it matters. He drove four hours to be here. Two summers ago he stood with her husband in a hospital corridor at one in the morning and prayed with him, quietly, for a long time, and then went and got them both coffee from the machine and did not say a word about it afterward to anyone.

He is not the problem. She has never once thought he was the problem.

But she has been in rooms like this for twenty years now, and somewhere in those twenty years her body learned the shape of a talk. She can feel it turn. There is a particular softening in a voice at about the eighty minute mark, a slowing down, a hand coming off the lectern, and she knows, the way you know a song is going to modulate, that they are two sentences away from the close.

And then it comes.

"Now, I want to share something God has laid on my heart. A burden."

Deb's thumb finds the corner of the program and folds it. Her shoulders come up maybe an inch, which nobody in the world would notice, including her, most nights.

She hears the rest of it fine. It is a good cause and a real need. The man means every word. The woman at the end of the row is already crying, the way she does at everything, and Deb loves her for it.

They stand for the closing song. Deb knows the words. Her mouth does the words. And behind her sternum something has quietly closed, like a hand closing, and she cannot get it to open again by wanting it to.

Out through the double doors. The night is warm. The sound guy is coiling a cable on the stage behind her, elbow to wrist, elbow to wrist.

She gets in the car and does not start it.

Ten minutes later she calls her friend Anita from the parking lot with the windows down.

"It's not God," she says. "I want to be clear about that. I don't dread God at all."

"Okay," says Anita.

"I dread the last ten minutes."

Where that sentence actually sits

The verse I want to set down beside that parking lot does not arrive at the beginning of a triumphant chapter. It arrives at the end of a chapter about a person who cannot manage it.

Read Romans 7 sometime and notice how tired the writing is. The good I want to do, I do not do. The thing I do not want to do is the thing I keep doing. It runs on like that for most of a page, honest and worn out and going in circles, and it finally arrives at a cry: who will rescue me from this?

That is where the next line lands.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.Romans 8:1

Not therefore, try harder. Not therefore, here is a plan. The answer to a page of exhausted circling is a legal statement about the exhausted person's standing, and the statement is that there is no case.

You are in Christ Jesus tonight, and Romans 8:1 says the verdict standing over you right now is no condemnation at all. That is written, and it has been written for a very long time, and the Spirit does not spend the evening talking you into it. He countersigns it.

And then there is that small word in the middle, which is doing more work than any other word in the sentence. Now.

Not eventually. Not once the follow-through improves. Not on the far side of the assignment you did not take up in March. The apostle put a timestamp in a legal sentence, and the timestamp is the present moment of whoever happens to be reading it.

You have that verdict now, at twenty past eight in a parking lot with the engine off, and there is no clause in it about the last twenty years. The written word set the word now at the front of that sentence deliberately; what the Spirit adds is that the now is this one, tonight, in the car you are actually sitting in.

A request and a verdict are two different objects

Here is what I think has happened to you, and I do not think anybody did it on purpose.

A request is a thing one person hands across a room to another. It has weight, and it can be heavy, and you can hold it and turn it over and say yes to it or say no to it, and either way it is still only a request. It came from a person. It goes back to a person. Nothing about what you are changes in the transaction.

A verdict is a different object entirely. A verdict comes from a bench, and it does not ask, and it lands on what you are rather than on what you will do about Thursday.

For twenty years those two things have been arriving in the same ten minutes, from the same warm voice, in the same softening tone, and your body has done what bodies do. It has stopped distinguishing between them. So a good man with a real need clears his throat at the eighty minute mark, and something in you hears a bench.

You are not standing in front of a bench when a man on a platform asks for help, and there is no docket anywhere with your name on it. Romans 8:1 closed that case in writing, and the Holy Spirit is not the prosecutor in the last ten minutes of a meeting. Jesus sent Him under the name Comforter, and He has never once worked in the other office.

I want to say something about the people who taught you to brace, because this is where a message like this usually turns mean and I am not taking that turn.

The man who drove four hours is not a villain. Neither is the woman who taught you at fifteen, or the pastor whose sermon you can still quote, or the conference in the rented hall where you signed the card. Most of them were handing you a request in the only language they had, and a great many of them were also carrying something heavy at the time. You do not have to indict a single one of them in order to be free of the dread. The dread came from a fusion, not from a person.

And I am not going to hand you a smaller assignment to replace the big one. There is no lighter quota here, no gentle three things instead of ten, no one small faithful thing you could manage this week if you really wanted to. Watch for that move wherever you meet it, including in me. A softer quota is still a quota, and your shoulders already know the difference.

You have nothing left to prove in that auditorium, because whatever you were trying to prove there was settled before you ever walked in. Scripture put the settling in the past tense and the verdict in the present tense, and the Spirit is agreeing with both at the precise moment your shoulders come up an inch.