The Friend Who Stood Up First

Rochelle has nine folding chairs in her arms and she has stopped moving.

The closing song is on its third time through, and she was clearing the back row to beat the line at the doors. Then a girl in the fourth row stood up.

Nine years old, about. A cardigan over a Sunday dress and white socks folded down at the ankle. She stood because the girl beside her stood first, and you could watch it happen across her face: the friend went, and there was half a second where she looked at the seat that had just gone empty and decided she was not going to be the one still sitting.

They went down the aisle holding hands. Both of them crying a little, neither of them entirely sure why.

Rochelle set the chairs down without folding the last one.

Because in 1997 the carpet in that other room was green, and there was a seam running up the middle of the aisle you could feel through the soles of your shoes, and she was in the third row, and Danielle Pryor stood up first.

She is thirty-eight now. She has taught the Thursday women's study for six years and can find anything in the book of John without the tabs. She prays for her neighbors by name and she means it. And every single time somebody in that Thursday room says the words when I got saved, something behind her ribs goes very quiet, because she has exactly one night to point at, and she remembers exactly what was in her head while she walked.

Not her sin. Not the cross. Danielle's back, going down the aisle without her.

She prayed the words. A woman with warm hands knelt on that green carpet and prayed them with her, one line at a time, and Rochelle meant them the way a nine-year-old means things, which is completely and for about four minutes. Her mother cried in the car on the way home. That was the night, and there has never been another one.

Twenty-nine years of taking that night out at odd hours and holding it up to the light, checking the motive on it the way you check a bill you are almost sure you already paid.

And in all twenty-nine years she has never once said out loud the sentence she actually carries, which is this one. Whatever happened to me that night happened by accident, on somebody else's legs.

You know which row.

You could walk to it in the dark. You know what the carpet felt like, and you know exactly what was going through your head when you stood up, and it was not the cross. It was a friend. Or your mother's face. Or the plain fact that the aisle was filling and the window was closing and you did not want to be the one left in the seat.

And you have never told anybody, because the people around you would say something kind, and kind is the last thing on earth you want. You are not asking to be reassured.

You are asking to know.

Yet not I

There is a man writing a letter to a church that has started measuring itself, and halfway through a sentence he does something strange with the grammar. He is writing about who is doing the living.

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.Galatians 2:20

Look at what he does there. He says I live, takes it back in four words, yet not I, and hands the whole thing over to somebody else. And then comes the part I want in your hands this morning. The life which I now live.

Now. Not the life I started. Not the day on the road. Now.

So hear this, and hear that it is not my opinion arriving in your kitchen. That line is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it across two thousand years into the room where you are standing: you are not holding a receipt from an evening in 1997. You are holding a life, and it is going on inside you at this moment, while you read.

Look at whose beginning that was. The man who wrote that sentence started out on a road with papers in his bag and a plan to put families in prison. Nobody walked an aisle for him. He was knocked flat by a light he never asked for and got up unable to see. If a clean beginning were the qualification, he is the first man disqualified, and he is the one God had write the sentence down.

You have Christ living in you, and He came in the way He has always come in, on His own initiative and at His own cost. The written word says He loved me and gave Himself for me. It never once says He waited at the front of a room to find out whose idea it was that you came, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moved a nine-year-old off a folding chair, using a friend to do it, because He has always used somebody's back going down an aisle first.

Now that sentence you carry. It happened by accident, on somebody else's legs. I am going to speak to that one directly, because it has been living in your house rent free and it has no covenant right to stay there. Andrew heard first and fetched his brother, and his brother got the keys. A woman at a well ran back into town with a testimony full of holes, and the whole town came out on it. Scripture never records God being embarrassed by how the message arrived, and the Holy Spirit does not disown at thirty-eight what He began through a child's loyalty to her friend.

Here is what the auditing has been doing to you. Twenty-nine years of examining one four-minute stretch for a purity of motive that no nine-year-old in history has ever produced, and a fair number of adults have not managed either. And the whole time you were hunting for evidence of life, the life has been standing up in the room, breathing.

You are the one who can find John without the tabs. You are the one who prays for the neighbors by name when nobody is checking. Nobody manufactures that. A person cannot talk themselves into being hungry for God any more than they can talk themselves into being thirsty. The written word says it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, and that ache you have been dismissing as habit is the Holy Spirit's own fingerprint pressed on the inside of your chest.

And I am not handing you a second night to fix the first one. Nothing here is asking you to go back to the front of any room, or to redo one thing, or to produce a better beginning than the one you were given. Paul did not have a better beginning. He had a Savior, and so do you.

What I will not do is tell you what you are going to feel. That part is His and I do not command it. My part is to put what is written in front of you and say it plainly, and the Holy Spirit does the rest.