I Can Lift A Room And I Cannot Do One Person

Deborah can take four hundred people from flat to their feet and she cannot get one sentence out across a kitchen table.

She has known this about herself for a while and has recently stopped being able to file it under humor.

In a room she is unafraid. She knows what is happening in it, she knows when it turns, she knows when to press and when to wait, and she has been doing it for twenty-two years and she is very good at it. People travel to be in those rooms.

And then she sits down with one woman, and the woman is in trouble, and there is a plain and obvious and strengthening thing that Deborah can see about her, and it does not come out.

What comes out instead is warmth, and prayer, and a great deal of genuine love, and a general encouragement that would fit almost anybody.

The specific one stays in. Every time.

She is forty-eight. And what has been troubling her these last months is not that she is failing at a small thing while succeeding at a big one. It is that she has begun to suspect she has the sizes the wrong way round.

Four hundred people leave that room lifted and go home and mostly stay the same. One woman at a table, told one true specific thing about herself, changes.

Deborah knows this. She can say it out loud about other people. And she still cannot do it.

She has not told anybody, because everybody who knows her knows her as the one who is not afraid of anything.

You may know that table.

Maybe you can carry a room too. Maybe the one-to-one is the part that empties you. And maybe you have begun to wonder which of the two is actually the big one.

The two verbs in Acts

There is a single verse in Acts that describes two men doing this, and it uses two plain verbs, and neither of them requires a crowd or a platform or anything you would recognize as a service.

And Judas and Silas, being prophets also themselves, exhorted the brethren with many words, and confirmed them.Acts 15:32

Exhorted. Confirmed.

Exhort means to come alongside and urge. Confirm means to make firm, to strengthen a thing that was already there but was wobbling.

Both of those are what you do to a specific person about a specific wobble. You cannot confirm a crowd; a crowd is not a thing that was already there and going soft in one place. You can move a crowd, and lift it, and that is a real and useful work and it is not the word in this verse.

And notice the phrase in the middle: with many words. Not with an oracle. Not with a pronouncement. With many words, which is to say ordinary speech, at length, the way a person talks to a person.

Which means the thing you cannot do is the thing the verse actually describes, and the thing you can do is a different and genuine work that this particular sentence is not about.

And what you cannot do is the plainest version of it rather than the hardest. The written word chooses two verbs about coming alongside and steadying, and says it happened with many words, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a woman who has carried rooms for twenty-two years and never a table.

And He speaks and you can carry it plainly. The word puts strengthening and comfort as the whole purpose of this, and the Spirit is the one who supplies it rather than requiring an atmosphere first.

Why the room is easier

Now the mechanism, because you have been calling this a fear and it is not exactly a fear.

In a room you are covered. Four hundred people means no single person can hold you to any one sentence, the response is collective, and if a line does not land the room carries it past. You have never in twenty-two years had to watch one face receive one specific thing and do nothing with it.

At a table there is no cover at all. One face, one sentence, and whatever happens next happens in front of you at a distance of three feet.

That is not cowardice. That is a completely different exposure, and being brilliant at one has never once prepared anybody for the other, in any field, ever.

And there is a second thing, and it is the harder one. In a room you are giving a general word to a general people and nobody can be wounded by it. At a table you could be wrong about a specific woman, and she would still be sitting there.

And what stops you is exposure rather than a failure of nerve. The word says God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, and the Spirit is the one who names what is actually operating rather than leaving you calling it cowardice.

And nothing about you is under review for twenty-two years of rooms. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman everybody thinks is unafraid of anything.

And nobody is taking the rooms

Let me be plain, because this could read as a criticism of your whole life's work and it is not.

Nothing here says stop carrying rooms. That is a real gift, people are genuinely helped in them, and they should keep traveling. I am not trading one thing for another and nobody is asking you to choose.

And nothing here hands you a future to give anybody. Not what will happen to that woman, not her health, not her marriage, not a date, not an outcome, because none of that is this and the fence around this exists precisely so that a table stays survivable.

What is on offer is one specific true thing about who a person already is, said to her face, with nothing else in the room.

And you are permitted to say the specific one at three feet. The word describes it happening with many words, person to person, in an ordinary account of two men doing an ordinary thing, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a new standard to fail.