She Has Not Been Alone With Him Since March

Four rooms a week, and every one of them is real.

There is the Tuesday morning one, which is nine women and has been running six years. There is Wednesday, which she helps with. There is Sunday, obviously, and there is a Thursday thing every fortnight that she would not miss.

None of it is performance. She wants that said before anything else, because the easy version of this story is that a woman was busy doing church and had lost the plot, and that is not what happened.

God is in those rooms. She has seen things in the Tuesday one that she will be telling people about when she is eighty.

The trouble is that He is only in those rooms.

She worked it out in a supermarket in August, which is apparently where women in this life work everything out. She was trying to remember the last time she had been alone with Him. Not thinking about Him. Not praying while doing something. Alone, in a room, with nothing else happening.

March.

And it was not even a proper one. It was about eleven minutes in a car before a hospital visit, and she remembers it because she cried, and it was the last time.

Five months.

And she is not dry. That is the thing that has made this so hard to see. She is in four rooms a week where God is loudly and genuinely present, and she comes out of most of them full, and if you asked her how she was doing spiritually she would say, honestly, very well.

But she has started to feel like somebody who lives at a party.

Always company. Always something happening. Always warm, and never once in her own house with the door shut and one other Person in it.

And you know this. Your life with God is full and it is real and every bit of it has other people in it, and you cannot remember the last time it was just the two of you.

Come away by yourselves

There is a moment in Mark six where the demand is at its highest and He does the opposite of what any of us would do.

The disciples have just come back from being sent out. They are full of it. They are reporting everything they have done and taught, which is exactly the good and healthy thing, and the crowd is so heavy that the account gives one of the most vivid details in the Gospels: they did not even have time to eat.

And here is what He says.

And he said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while."Mark 6:31

Come away by yourselves.

Not stop. Not shut anything down, and not a word about the crowd being a mistake. He does not criticize the demand and He does not say the sending out was too much.

He removes them, briefly, on purpose, to somewhere with nobody in it.

You are being invited out of a full room by the One who filled it, and He has done this before with people who were doing everything right. It is written that He said to them, come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while (Mark 6:31), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old instruction land on a woman who has just counted five months in a supermarket.

Now the fullness, because it matters that this is named accurately.

You come out of most of those rooms full and you would tell anybody you are doing very well, and you would not be lying.

That is true and it is one of the reasons this went unnoticed for five months. Emptiness gets attention. Fullness does not, and a person can be genuinely full and simultaneously never alone with anybody, and nothing in the system flags it.

You are full and you are unaccompanied in private, and both of those can be true in the same week. Scripture says my soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food, and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips, when I remember you upon my bed and meditate on you in the watches of the night (Psalm 63:5-6), and it is the Holy Spirit who is available in the watches of the night, where there is nobody else in the room at all.

And the eleven minutes in March.

You remember it because you cried. That is worth sitting with rather than passing over.

Eleven minutes alone with Him in a car produced something that five months of four full rooms a week has not produced, and you have not asked yourself why, because you have been busy.

You know exactly what happens when you are alone with Him, because it happened in March. It is written that when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret (Matthew 6:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a shut door into a meeting, which is the arrangement Christ describes as normal.

And the party.

That is your own image and it is precise. Always company, always something happening, always warm, and never in your own house with one other Person in it.

Nobody is telling you to leave the party. Four rooms of that quality are a rare and good life and there are people who would give a great deal for one of them.

You are not being asked to give up a single room, only to go home some of the time. Scripture says come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while (Mark 6:31), and it is His Spirit who is in the desolate place as fully as He is in the crowded one, which is exactly the thing a woman who lives at a party stops believing.