Out Of A Spare Room

It is the room at the back that was going to be an office and never was.

Eleven years. Twelve chairs, and four of them are from a school that was throwing them out, and there is a stain on the carpet from something in the second year that nobody has ever fully explained.

There is no budget. There has never been a budget. When something is needed somebody brings it and when nothing is needed nobody does, and in eleven years there has not been a single conversation about money that lasted longer than a minute.

Between nine and fifteen people, most weeks. Four marriages have come out of that room. Two people have died out of it and both funerals were arranged from that room in about six hours. There is a man who came for eleven months and said almost nothing and then said one thing, and everybody who was there that night still talks about it.

And when people ask him what he has, he goes small.

It happens at conferences, mostly, and at the thing his brother-in-law runs. Somebody says: so what have you got? And there is a beat, and then he says: oh, we are just a little group at my house.

Just. Every time. Eleven years and he has never once managed to say it without that word.

And afterwards, in the car, he is annoyed with himself in a way that has become familiar and has never once produced a change.

He made tents, and the account does not apologize

Let me name the beat before the word, because that is where the whole thing lives.

There is a beat. A very short pause in which you translate what you have into what they are asking about, and the translation always comes out short, because the question is about size and what you have is not measured that way.

The word just is what fills the pause. It is not modesty. It is a man supplying the disappointment in advance so that nobody else has to.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as encouragement: what you have is not a small version of a real thing, and the account records the same arrangement without one word of apology. That is not my kind reading of eleven years, it is what stands written in the eighteenth chapter of Acts, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved it has been in that room every week.

Read it. It is a piece of ordinary biography dropped into the middle of the narrative.

He went to see them, and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them.Acts 18:2-3

He made tents.

The man who wrote most of that collection paid his own way with his hands, in somebody else's workshop, alongside a couple whose own home became the meeting place in more than one city.

And Luke reports it flatly. No apology, no explanation, no line about how they hoped to have proper premises before long. It is simply how it was, and the account does not treat it as a stage on the way to something.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a building: the arrangement you have is the arrangement it moved in, because the written word records a tentmaker in a workshop and a couple's house as the ordinary furniture of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who has filled a back room between nine and fifteen times a week for eleven years.

And the guard, because this can tip into something false. Nothing here says premises are wrong or that people with budgets have missed it. They have not. A great deal of good is done with rooms and money and staff, and there is nothing holy about a stained carpet.

What is written simply never treats the small version as the incomplete version, and the Holy Spirit has been working in houses since the first century because that is where people were.