Two Years With the Camera Off

Tuesday, ten to eight, and five faces come up on the screen one after another: a kitchen with a stove hood behind it, a hallway, somebody's spare room with a drying rack in shot, Dorothy at seventy eight far too close to the lens as always, and the man from the coast whose signal freezes him mid word every single week and everybody has stopped mentioning it.

And then a sixth tile. Dark gray, no picture, a name in white letters in the middle of it.

That is her, and it has been her for two years.

She has reasons, and they are good ones. The room behind her is not one she wants five people looking at. Her face broadcasts absolutely everything, and she has always known it, since school. And there is the plain fact that watching yourself in a little box in the corner while trying to listen to a person is its own particular exhaustion, and she has enough of that on any given Tuesday already.

What nobody on the call could tell you, because it is invisible by design, is that she is the reason the thing still exists. She types the reading into the chat every week because two of them can never find it. She is the one who noticed Dorothy said her sister was going into hospital, and she is the one who sent a message on the Thursday to ask how it went. When the man from the coast dropped out for a month after his wife died, hers was the only name that kept appearing in his inbox, saying nothing clever, saying we are here on Tuesday if you want us.

Six months ago Dorothy said, to the group, that she did not know what they would do without whoever it is that sends the messages.

Whoever it is. She laughed at that, alone, in a dark gray rectangle with her name in it, and something under the laugh went sideways and has not quite settled since.

The man who did not know

Let me say the first thing plainly, because you may be braced for it: nobody here is going to ask you to turn the camera on.

Your reasons are your reasons, and some of them are the kind a person should not have to explain to anybody. A quiet life is not a small life. Privacy is not cowardice. There is nothing wrong with a person who does their loving from slightly out of shot, and if any article ever leaves you feeling that the answer to your Tuesday is a bigger square with your face in it, close the tab.

The thing being taken off you tonight is something else. It is the word hidden.

There is a moment near the end of Exodus where Moses comes down off the mountain with the two tablets under his arm after forty days of speaking with God, and the text says something almost casual about him.

Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.Exodus 34:29

He did not know. That is the whole line and it is one of the loveliest facts in the Old Testament. He was not shining on purpose. He had not arranged it, could not see it, was not monitoring it and would not have been able to increase it if he had tried. Everybody else in the camp could see it, and the one carrying it had no idea, and it cost him precisely nothing to be looked at, because none of it was his.

Take that as yours right now, in your gray square. You are not hidden. You have been shone through for years by God Himself, in a front room nobody can see into, and Scripture puts the light in the account of the One who gave it rather than in the account of the one carrying it. The Holy Spirit is not asking you to hold anything up. He is telling you what is already the case.

And notice the order in that camp. The shining came first and the veil came later, and Moses put it on himself. Nobody ever tore it off him. God did not shame him out of it. That is worth knowing on a night when a person feels got at by every talk they have ever heard about letting your light shine.

Because that phrase, in Matthew, is not an instruction with a target attached. Jesus says you are the light of the world to a hillside of fishermen and farmers and nobodies before one of them had done a single thing about it. It is a description. It is said over people who could not have earned it and would not have believed it if He had asked them to work it up.

So here is what is actually true of you tonight, and it is not a task. You have light in you that you did not switch on and cannot switch off, and the word says so, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it real in you rather than merely accurate. Every Thursday message you have ever sent came out of it. You were not being nice. You were shining, in a way you cannot see, in a room the camera never went into.

Which changes the meaning of the black square. It was never a lid. A person can be seen and lose nothing, because the seeing does not take anything out of them: the light is not depleted by anybody looking at it, and it never once belonged to you in the first place.

And notice who did the noticing in that account. You have been shining in a room where nobody applauded, and it counted the entire time. Exodus 34:29 says Moses did not know that his face shone, which is written as a plain fact about him and not as a failure of his self-awareness. The Spirit is not asking you to become aware of it either. He is asking you to stop treating the not-knowing as evidence against it.