Nobody Has Come In Six Years

Nobody new has walked through that door since the year of the storm.

He has checked, more than once, because it seems like the kind of thing a man could be wrong about. He is not wrong. Six years.

The hall is opened every week. The heater goes on an hour before in winter because it takes an hour. Somebody makes the tea. There are eleven of them and there have been eleven or twelve for a long time and four of them are over eighty.

It is not a sad room. That is the thing people get wrong when he tries to explain it. There is a lot of laughing in that hall and there is more genuine kindness in those eleven people than in most places with three hundred.

But nobody new has come. Six years, and the population of that place has not grown either, so it is not mysterious.

Here is what got him, in the autumn, carrying chairs.

He caught himself putting out fourteen instead of eleven, the way he always has, and he thought: why do I still do that?

And he stood there in the middle of the hall with three chairs in his hands.

Because he did not have an answer, and because he suddenly could not tell whether putting out three extra chairs for six years was faith or whether it was just what his hands do now.

In the morning sow thy seed

Sit down on those boards a minute, because there is a line in Ecclesiastes for exactly this, and it is written by a man who has looked at everything and is not sentimental about any of it.

In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.Ecclesiastes 11:6

In the morning sow. In the evening do not stop.

And the reason given is not a promise. Read it again, because this is the honest verse in the whole subject: for thou knowest not.

He does not say sow because it will work. He says sow because you cannot tell which one will, or whether both will, and you have no access to that information and you never will, and therefore keep your hand from stopping in the evening. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit has kept your hand going for six years without needing you to know.

That is a much harder and much better reason than a guarantee, and it is the only one that holds up in year six.

Hear this in your own hall. You have not been wasting six years, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture tells a man to sow morning and evening precisely because he cannot tell what will prosper, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has had you turning that heater on an hour early every winter week for six years.

Now let me name the question you asked with three chairs in your hands, because it is a good question and it deserves a straight answer.

Faith and habit look identical from the outside, and mostly they are the same action.

A man who puts out fourteen chairs in year one because he believes somebody might come, and a man who puts out fourteen in year six because his hands do it, are doing the same visible thing. And it does not matter nearly as much as you think, because the chairs are out either way and the hall is open either way and the tea is made either way.

Habit is what faith becomes when it stops needing to be felt every week. That is not a decline. That is a man who has been doing something so long that it no longer requires a decision, which is exactly what everybody in that hall relies on.

Hear this too, and let it land on those boards. Your gathering has not failed, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the sowing in your hands and the prospering entirely outside them, and the Spirit of God has never once made the size of a room the measure of the man who unlocks it.

And let me be plain, because this is where these pages lie to people. Nobody is promising you that somebody will come. Not next year and not ever, and I am not going to tell you the fourteenth chair will be filled, because I do not know and neither does anybody else who might tell you otherwise.

Eleven people, four of them over eighty, in a hall at the end of a track, who have carried each other for six years. Nothing about that needs a fifteenth person to be worth doing.