Eleven Times Down the Same Aisle

She keeps count, which is the first thing you need to know about her.

Eleven. She could tell you roughly when each one was. Two of them at the same summer camp, four years apart. One at a funeral, which she has always felt slightly odd about. One in a school hall in a town she was only passing through, where she did not know a single person and went forward anyway because that is how bad it was that week.

Eleven times down the front for the same thing.

She is not going to name the thing here and she does not have to. You have one, or you know somebody who does, and the shape is the same whatever the content is: the thing that comes back, that she has repented of in tears more than once, that she has told a leader about and told God about and told nobody about, and that was in her house again on Thursday.

And on Sunday the invitation came and she felt it start.

That pull in the chest. The hand of God on the back of the neck, is how her grandmother used to put it. She knew, the way you know, that she was supposed to get up.

And she gripped the chair in front of her and stayed exactly where she was.

Not because she did not believe it would help. Because of the row. Because the woman two seats down has watched her go up three times in two years, and because a person who goes forward eleven times is a person announcing to a whole building that the last ten did not take.

She sat there through the whole thing with her jaw set and her eyes stinging, and she went out to the car park fast so she would not have to talk to anybody.

The apostle said out loud that he had not arrived

Let me put something down before we go one step further, because it is the whole floor this stands on.

Nothing you are carrying is a verdict on your faith. Not the thing itself, not eleven, not Thursday. There is no arithmetic in the kingdom where the number of times somebody has come back is subtracted from what they are worth, and anybody who has made you feel that is going to have to answer for it and it will not be you.

Now hear this, and take it as finished rather than as kindness: you are not disqualified and you never were. That is not my soft reading of a hard Sunday, it is what stands written to the Philippians, where a man with a résumé nobody could touch says flatly that he has not obtained it and is not yet perfect, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that letter had His hand on the back of your neck in that row.

Read what Paul is willing to say about himself in public, in writing, to a church that looked up to him.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal.Philippians 3:12-14

I press on. Present tense, repeated, in a letter he expected to be read out loud in front of people.

He is describing a life of continuing to move toward something he has not reached, and he does not treat that as evidence against himself. He treats it as the shape of the thing.

So the going forward is not the confession of a failure. It is the pressing on, in a building, with your feet, and this is yours right now rather than pending some future clean run: every one of those eleven walks was you moving toward Him, and the written word calls that pressing on, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been drawing you up out of that seat every time.

Now let me touch the row, because the row is the real problem and we both know it.

You did not stay in your seat because of God. You stayed because of the woman two seats down and what she might be counting.

But here is what is actually true about that. She is not counting. And if she is, she is counting because she has her own thing and yours makes her feel less alone, which is not a threat, it is company.

The written word says we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony, and the Holy Spirit does some of His plainest work in a room through one person who is willing to walk up the front in view of everybody for the twelfth time.

And to be clear: this is not a piece telling you that going forward is the required move. There is no correct way to come to God and no ritual with power in it, and a woman who prays in her kitchen has done exactly as much as a woman who walks an aisle. What is being taken off you is the shame, not your freedom to do it however you like.