Two Years, Under Guard

Two years and he has not been further than the chemist.

His mother is in the front room now because the stairs stopped working eighteen months ago, and there is a bed where the table used to be, and everything in that house has moved about four feet from where it was in order to make room for something medical.

He is up twice most nights. Three times on a bad week.

The world outside has gone on. His brother rings from an airport sometimes. Two of his friends have had a whole falling out and reconciliation that he only knows about secondhand. There was a wedding in March that he watched forty seconds of on somebody's phone.

He is not resentful about his mother. Ask him and he will tell you plainly that he would not have it any other way and he means it, and if you offered him a way out of it tomorrow he would not take it.

What he is, is disappeared.

That is his word. He said it once to a district nurse, at about half eight in the evening, and then apologized for saying it, and she said do not apologize, and he changed the subject.

There is a sentence he says now, when anybody asks. My life is on hold at the minute. He has said it so many times that it has stopped meaning anything and started doing something instead, which is that it explains, every single time, why nothing is happening.

The last thing in the account happens indoors

I want to sit with you a minute before I say anything, because you have been handed advice by people who go out.

Two years of nights. Four rooms. A bed where the table was. You are doing one of the hardest things a person does and there is no audience for it at all, and the word you used to the nurse was the right word, and you were right to say it and wrong to apologize.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: your life is not on hold, and the record ends with a man confined for exactly as long as you have been. That is not my kindness talking, it is what stands written at the close of the twenty-eighth chapter of Acts, and the same Holy Spirit who has kept that account for us is in that front room at three in the morning.

Read the last two verses. Notice where they are set.

For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. He proclaimed the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.Acts 28:30-31

For two whole years. Under guard, awaiting a hearing, unable to leave.

That is the ending. The whole account of the thing moving out across the world ends with a man who cannot go anywhere, in rented rooms, receiving whoever turned up.

And the last word of the whole book is unhindered. About a man in custody.

So take this now rather than when the caring ends: the ministry is not waiting for you outside, because the written word puts the closing scene indoors with a man who could not leave and calls it unhindered, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been up with you twice a night for two years.

And the guard, because I am not going to be glib with you.

Nothing here says your confinement is fine or that you should not be tired. You should be tired. You are tired because it is tiring, not because you are failing at it, and there is no verse that makes a broken night not a broken night.

What is written simply never treats the small room as the place where nothing counts, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed you mobile in order to work through you.