In Out of the Rain

She had not been inside a church in nine years and that was a decision, not a drift.

There had been a specific two years at the end that she does not talk about, and when she left she left properly. She was not bitter about it in a way anybody could see. She simply had a life now that did not have that in it, and if you had asked her she would have said she was fine, and she would mostly have been telling the truth.

Then she was walking, on a holiday she had taken alone because she wanted to, and the weather came in fast off the hill the way it does.

There was a ruin on the path. Roofless. Waist-high grass inside it and a gable end still standing at one side, and a doorway, and she went in because it was the only thing between her and the rain.

She stood in the corner with her hood up for about ten minutes and watched the water come down into the middle of the floor, where there had not been a floor for two hundred years.

And something happened to her that she has been unable to explain since.

Not a voice. Nothing like a voice. But the walls had been put there by somebody, and put there carefully, with a bit of shaping around the door that nobody would have needed to do, and there had been singing in there for a very long time, and the rain was coming into the middle of it and she was standing in the corner with her hood up, and her chest did something she had not asked it to do.

She stayed for forty minutes. The rain stopped after fifteen.

And she has been embarrassed about it ever since. That is the honest word. Because she left for good reasons and she is not going to be pulled back by architecture, and there is something humiliating in a woman who walked out on her own two feet being ambushed by wet stones.

He was in that place, and nobody was expecting Him

I want to be careful here, and I am going to say the careful thing first.

Nothing in this is an argument for you to go back somewhere. I do not know your two years and I do not know what happened in them, and anybody who tells a stranger what to do with a church they left is speaking about a life they have not seen. That is not what this is. Your leaving is yours and it stays yours.

But hear this, and take it as a finished thing rather than as an invitation: you were met. You are not a woman who got sentimental about masonry. That is not my reading of your holiday, it is what stands written in Genesis, where a man on the run sleeps on a stone in the middle of nowhere and wakes up saying the Lord was in this place and I was not aware of it, and the same Holy Spirit who was in that page was in a roofless building on a hillside in the rain.

Look at Jacob's own words, because he is not a hero in that story and he has nothing prepared.

When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it. He was afraid and said, how awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.Genesis 28:16-17

He was not on a pilgrimage. He was running away from a family situation entirely of his own making. He did not choose that spot for any reason except that the sun went down, and he had no expectation of anything whatsoever.

That is the whole shape of it. He was reached in a place he had not chosen, on a night he had not planned, in circumstances he was not proud of.

And this is yours, right now and not once you have decided how you feel about churches: what happened in the ruin was a meeting, not a mood. The word says a man found the gate of heaven at a random overnight stop and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a place open like that, and He has never restricted Himself to buildings with roofs and rotas.

Now let me touch the embarrassment, because it is the actual injury here.

You feel foolish, and underneath the foolishness is a fear that you are less solid than you thought. That you walked out on your own two feet and could be walked back in by wet stone, and if that is true then your leaving was never really yours.

It is not true. Being moved is not being overruled. Nobody took your decision off you in that doorway, and nothing that happened in there obliges you to anything at all. The written word says God is not a man that He should lie, and the Holy Spirit does not work by ambush and never has.

You have been given a body that recognizes the presence of God, and it recognized. The written word says the Spirit bears witness with our spirit, which is a description of exactly what you felt and could not name, and He was not conducting a recruitment.