She Does Not Know I Come

She sits six rows back on the left where the pillar is, because from six rows back with the pillar you can see and not be seen, and she has been doing this for nine years.

A hall that fills from the front on a good day and from the middle on an ordinary one. Warm. That smell of a building that has been full since eight. Somebody has put the chairs out with the aisle slightly off center again, which happens most weeks and which nobody has ever raised.

She comes in four minutes late, on purpose. She leaves before the last thing finishes, on purpose. She has never once put her name on anything.

Six rows in front and one to the right is a woman she has been coming for.

They knew each other, a long time ago, in a way that ended badly and not entirely fairly, and there is no version of walking up to her afterward that would be a kindness rather than a scene. So this is what there is: nine years of sitting where she can see her, and praying through the whole of it, quietly, with her eyes open, which is a thing she learned to do young.

She knows the back of that head extremely well. She knows when the shoulders are wrong.

And what she thinks, most weeks, walking out early into the corridor before anybody turns around, is a question rather than a complaint: does any of this register anywhere at all?

Nine years. Nobody knows. Including the woman, who has no idea, and who would be astonished, and who may never find out.

That is you, and your six rows back might be a name you carry, a person you have never stopped praying for, a house you drive past, somebody whose birthday you mark alone.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to keep sitting there and taking it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not her. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

And I am not going to rally you. That has been done to you and it made you tired in a new way. I am not going to promise you a reunion either, or a moment where she turns round, because I do not know that and neither does anybody who tells you so.

Micah says the getting up first and the sitting second

There is a line spoken out of the middle of something very hard, and the order of its clauses is the whole of what it has to give.

Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.Micah 7:8

A word about the first clause before anything else, because on this site it matters. The adversary in that sentence is not a person in your life, and nothing here is going to hand you one. Whatever this is, it is not the woman six rows in front, and it never has been.

Now the two clauses that do the work.

When I fall, I shall arise. Not if. He grants the falling completely and puts the getting up on the far side of it as a settled thing rather than a hope.

When I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me. Again the granting. He does not say he will not sit in darkness. He says what is true while he is sitting in it, which is a different and much more usable claim.

And notice: sitting in darkness is a description of a person who is not moving and cannot see. That is the actual posture. Not marching, not overcoming, not visibly doing anything at all. Sitting.

You are sat in something you cannot see the end of, and there is a light in it that is not yours. That is not a lift for a woman six rows back: Micah 7:8 grants the falling and the darkness and puts the arising and the light on God's side, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a settled thing hold in a body that has been unseen for nine years rather than the certainty anybody can find walking out into a corridor.

Registering somewhere is not the same as registering with her

Here is the question she actually asked, and it deserves an exact answer rather than a comforting one.

She asked whether it registers anywhere. Not whether it registers with the woman. She has made her peace with that part, more or less, and she was not asking for a moment where somebody turns around.

Anywhere.

And the answer Scripture gives is not a promise that she will find out. It is that there is no such place as nowhere. There is no room in the building where a thing goes unregistered, and there is no category of prayer that goes into the air and stops, and nine years of a woman sitting where she can see the back of a head is not filed under nothing by anybody who counts.

That is the whole of it and it is not dressed up, because dressing it up would be a way of pretending she asked an easier question.

You have not been praying into nowhere, and there has never been such a place. The written word puts the light in the darkness and the arising after the fall and never once requires anybody to be seen doing it, and the Spirit of God has been carrying nine years out of a seat behind a pillar, never the visibility anybody achieves.

And nobody is asking you for one more push. The instruction attached to the whole armor is stand, four times in six verses and no fifth verb, and sitting six rows back for nine years is that verb sitting down.

You are standing, and standing was always the assignment. Scripture calls a person who is still there at the end of it standing, and His Spirit is what has had a woman in that seat every week since.