Six Months In And Still Nobody Came

She sets out eight chairs. She has always set out eight, from the first week, because eight felt hopeful without being silly.

She gets there forty minutes early because of the heating, which takes that long, and she does the kettle, and she puts the biscuits on a plate rather than leaving them in the packet, because her mother would have.

Then she sits down and waits.

Some weeks there are two. There is a woman who comes almost always and is lovely and never says very much, and there is a man who came for a stretch in the spring and then stopped, and she has never found out why and has decided not to ask in case the asking is a pressure.

Once there were five, in February, and she went home that night so happy she could not sleep.

Twice there have been none.

The none weeks are the ones. She sat for the full time both times, because leaving early felt like a statement she did not want to make in front of God, and she drank the tea and ate two of the biscuits and put the chairs away.

Six months.

And she is not the sort of person who quits things, and she has not quit, and the chairs went out again this week the same as always.

But something has shifted in her and she does not like it. She has started doing the thing where she gets there and sets up and quietly prepares herself for it to be nobody, so that nobody will not hurt. She has started managing her own expectations before the door, which is a kind of protective work that costs something every week.

And this week she caught herself thinking, in the car, in a flat voice: I do not actually know what this is for.

And you have set chairs out too. Maybe not chairs. But you started the thing you were asked to start, and you have been doing it, and it has not grown, and nobody has said anything about it, and you are beginning to prepare yourself for nothing before you even arrive.

He said I have labored in vain, and then said where his reward was

There is a servant in Isaiah, in a passage that looks forward to Christ Himself, who says a sentence out loud that most faithful people have thought and very few have dared write down.

But I said, "I have labored in vain; I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my right is with the Lord, and my recompense with my God."Isaiah 49:4

Look at the shape of it. Two halves, and the first half is not deleted by the second.

He does not say: I felt like I had labored in vain but of course I knew better. He says it flatly, and then he turns, in the same breath, and says where his recompense actually is, and both halves stand in the same verse forever.

You are allowed to say the first half out loud, and it does not cancel the second half, and Scripture puts both of them in one sentence so that nobody would have to choose. It is written, I have labored in vain, yet surely my right is with the Lord and my recompense with my God (Isaiah 49:4), and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a young woman hold a flat sentence in the car and a settled hope at the same time without either one being a lie.

Now the thing about the room filling.

Nowhere were you told the room filling was the assignment. You were asked to start the thing. The starting has happened, every week, for six months, in a cold hall with the heating that takes forty minutes.

Somewhere along the way the number in the room quietly became the measure, and nobody handed you that measure, and it does not appear anywhere in what you were asked to do.

You have been doing the assignment the entire time, and there is no week in the last six months where you failed it, including the two where nobody came. Scripture says it is required of stewards that they be found faithful (1 Corinthians 4:2), and the word is faithful, not fruitful, and it is the Holy Spirit who decides what grows and when, which has never been in a steward's job description.

And here is a thing that deserves saying plainly to somebody who puts the biscuits on a plate.

That detail is not nothing. Putting them on a plate for a room that might have two people in it is an act of honor, done in an empty hall, seen by God and by a woman who never says very much.

You have been building something real every week, and it is not the size of the room, it is the quality of the welcome, and one of those can be measured and the other cannot. It is written that whatever you do, do it heartily as for the Lord and not for men (Colossians 3:23), and it is His Spirit who receives a plate of biscuits in a cold hall as worship, because that is exactly what it is.

Now the protective work, because it costs more than the empty chairs do.

Preparing yourself for nobody, every week, before you go in: that is a small grief practiced in advance, over and over, and it wears a person down faster than disappointment does. It is also completely understandable, and there is no shame in it, and you invented it because nobody was there to carry it with you.

You are not required to brace before that door any more, and the bracing was never protection, it was you carrying the week's weight alone before it even started. Scripture says cast all your anxieties on Him because He cares for you (1 Peter 5:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who is in that hall forty minutes early with the heating, every single week, which is a fact about the room that has never once depended on attendance.

And what this page will not tell you.

It will not tell you that the room will fill. Nobody here knows that, and telling a faithful young woman that her numbers are coming would be a promise nobody was authorized to make, and she would remember it in April.

You are being handed the God who is in the room rather than a forecast about the room, and that is the only thing that has ever held anybody through a long season. It is written that the Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save (Zephaniah 3:17), and it is His Spirit who makes a nearly empty hall a place where God is, which is not a consolation prize.