Armor Made Of Light

The radiator ticks. That is the loudest thing in the building and it has been for about ten minutes.

It is a Wednesday and the church is empty because it is a Wednesday and churches like this one are empty on Wednesdays. Cold stone, a smell of old hymn books and candle wax and damp that has been there since before anybody now living was born. Three flowers in a jar on a windowsill, put there by somebody with a schedule and a key.

She came in because the door was open and she had twenty minutes and it was raining. That is all. She was not looking for anything.

And she has ended up standing over a brass in the floor. A knight, or a man who wanted to be remembered as one, laid out flat in engraved lines with his hands together and his feet on a small brass dog. Armor from the shins up. A helmet by his head. Somebody has walked across his face for six hundred years and worn the nose almost smooth.

She stands there with her coat still on, water coming off it onto the stone, and she waits to feel something.

She does not feel anything.

That is the part she would not tell anybody. Not that the church is cold or that the brass is sad, but that she stood in a room full of six hundred years of other people's courage and looked at a man carved in armor and could not locate one single thing inside herself that resembled it. No stirring. No lift. Nothing.

And she thought, quite calmly, the way you think a thing you have thought before: there is nothing in me for this.

The radiator ticks. She puts her hands in her pockets and stays another minute anyway, which she does not count as anything, and which is the only part of this that matters.

That is you, standing wherever you stand, waiting to feel something and not feeling it.

You have been in the room. You have read the words. You have watched people around you who seem to have some inner supply you were not issued, and you have quietly concluded that whatever the equipment is, it lives inside a person, and that you were built without the compartment.

Two plain things first. If your version of this includes somebody who frightens you or hurts you, nothing on this page is telling you to stay and absorb it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not the ones who seem to have it. Not the one who made this hard. Scripture is direct: the struggle is not against flesh and blood. That is a mercy and not a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

What Paul says the armor is made of

There is a sentence in Romans that answers a woman standing over a brass, and it does it by changing the material.

The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.Romans 13:12

The armor of light.

Sit with that for a second, because it undoes the whole picture on the floor. Light is not something a person generates. It is not an interior resource that some people have more of. Light arrives. It comes from somewhere else, it falls on things, and it does not consult the thing it falls on about whether it is ready.

So the covering Paul is describing is not made of the material she was looking for inside herself and failing to find. It never was.

You are wearing something that does not come from inside you and never depended on what you could locate in there. That is not a comforting phrase for a cold morning: Romans 13:12 names the armor as light and puts it in the category of things put on rather than produced, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a given thing rest on a person who is standing in a church feeling nothing at all.

And notice the verb, which is the same plain verb as everywhere else in this: put on. Not generate. Not summon. Not work up. Put on, the way you put on a coat that was already hanging by the door.

Feeling nothing is not the same as having nothing

Here is what I want to be careful about, because this is where people get quietly hurt.

Somewhere along the line, most of us were taught to read our own insides as a gauge. Feel a lift, the thing is working. Feel nothing, the thing has not arrived, or has left, or was never given. And so a whole category of steady, honest people stand in rooms waiting for a reading and conclude from a flat needle that the tank is empty.

The tank is not the needle. It never was.

You have been covered through every service you sat in feeling nothing, and the covering was not being measured by the feeling. The written word calls it armor of light and puts it on a person rather than in them, and the Spirit of God has been the one holding it there through years of a flat needle.

I am not going to give you a way to feel more. That would be a technique, and the moment a thing can be performed well or badly the whole weight of the outcome slides back onto the person performing it, and it has been sitting on you since you were young and it does not belong there.

There is no procedure on this page. There is a room, and a brass, and a radiator ticking, and light that was already in the building before you came in out of the rain.

You are standing in something that came from outside you, right now, with your coat still dripping on the stone. Scripture says put on the armor of light, and His Spirit is what makes a handed thing sit on a real woman on a real Wednesday.