I Can Take A Room There

Yolanda can do it and she is not being modest about it and she has never once been able to do it for herself.

She knows how. Not as a technique, and she would be offended at the word, but there is something she carries into a room, and when a situation is put in front of a group of people she can take them from where they are to somewhere they could not have got on their own. She has watched it happen for nineteen years. People have gone home changed.

And she is not there with them.

That is the sentence. She is at the front, doing it, and it is not fake, and what happens in that room is real and does not depend on her state. But her own situation, the one she has carried for eleven years, sits exactly where it sat before she started, and nothing that happens in those rooms touches it.

She has prayed for people about circumstances almost identical to hers and something has come, for them, in her hands, and she has driven home with hers untouched.

She is fifty-one and she has said none of this to anybody, because the version of the sentence that would come out is I am a hypocrite, and that is not true and she knows it is not true and she still cannot find the accurate words.

You may know that drive home.

Maybe you can also take people somewhere you cannot get to. Maybe you have also had something come for somebody else through your own hands. And maybe you have also reached for the word hypocrite and known that it did not fit.

The man who said both halves

There is a father in Mark 9 whose son is in a terrible state, and Jesus says something about believing, and the man answers with the most honest sentence in the Gospels.

Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.Mark 9:24

Both halves. In one breath. With no contradiction acknowledged and none required.

And here is the thing everybody skips: Jesus does not correct him. He does not say make up your mind. He does not send the man away to sort out his internal consistency and come back. The next thing that happens in that passage is the thing the father asked for.

Which means a person can be genuinely in both states at once, and Scripture records it approvingly, and the presence of the second half does not cancel the first.

That is your nineteen years exactly. What you carry into those rooms is real. What sits untouched on the drive home is also real. Both. And nobody in that passage is asked to resolve them before anything can happen.

And you can carry both of those at once and neither one makes the other false. The written word puts both halves in one sentence and records no rebuke for it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been reaching for the word hypocrite.

And you are not a fraud in those rooms. The word has the man's honest divided sentence answered rather than corrected, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring you to be internally consistent first.

Why yours is harder than theirs

Now let me name something structural, because I think you have felt it and been unable to say it.

You are in the wrong position to receive.

When you are carrying a room, you are working. Watching, listening, holding it steady, judging the moment. That is a posture, and it is the one posture in the building that cannot also be receiving, because receiving requires not being in charge of what happens next.

So it is not that the thing avoids you. It is that at the moment it moves through that room, you are the one person present who is doing something else.

And when you get home, there is no room, and no gathering, and nobody carrying you, and eleven years of your own situation, and you are supposed to somehow do for yourself what you have done for four thousand people. Nobody can do that. It is not a failure of faith; it is a fact about position.

And you are in the wrong posture to receive, which is not the same as being passed over. The word says two are better than one, and there is no clause exempting the person who usually carries, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a structural observation rather than an accusation.

And nothing about you is under review for eleven untouched years. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has never said any of this out loud.

What has never been arranged for you

One practical thing, and it is the piece that is actually missing.

In nineteen years, has anybody ever prayed for your situation, with you, in a room where you were not the one running it?

Not a passing thing at the end of an evening. An arranged occasion, with one or two people who know you, where you say the eleven year thing out loud and then stop talking and let somebody else carry it.

I suspect the answer is no, or almost no, and I suspect the reason is that everybody assumes the person who carries rooms does not need it, and you have never corrected them, because correcting them would require the sentence you have never been able to word.

That is arrangeable. It requires one phone call and about four minutes of embarrassment.

And you are allowed to be carried. The word says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, and it does not exempt the person who usually does the bearing, and the Spirit is the one who makes being on the receiving end ordinary rather than humiliating.