Two Years at a Locked Door

The chapel is at the bend where the lane starts to climb, and it has been shut since before she moved here. Stone, slate, two windows boarded with ply that has gone silver, and a green door with a hasp and a padlock the size of her fist.

She walks the dog past it at about half seven every morning. Every morning for two years.

It started in a bad autumn. She was reading in the front room at an hour she had no business being awake, and a line came up off the page and stood there in the middle of her chest the way sometimes a line does: behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it. She was not looking for it. It landed. She told her friend about it on the Thursday, and her friend put a hand on her shoulder and prayed it back to her, and they both got a bit teary in a kitchen, and it was one of the realest half hours of her adult life.

And the next morning she walked the dog and came round the bend and looked at that chapel and something in her went: that one.

She has never quite known what she meant. Something for the village. Somewhere for the young ones on the estate with nowhere to go on a Friday. A door that opens.

Two years.

In the first summer a sign went up from an agency and she nearly stopped breathing, and in the autumn it came down again and nothing happened. Somebody bought it and did not buy it. A skip appeared for a fortnight and left full. The padlock has gone properly rusty now, orange at the shackle, and there is buddleia coming out of the gutter above the door, and the ply on the left window has started to bow.

And here is the part she does not tell anybody.

She has started walking the other way round.

Not always. But most mornings now she goes up the top path and comes back along the field, and it adds eleven minutes, and she tells herself the dog likes the stile. She knows what she is doing. She is avoiding a building. Because when she comes round that bend and sees the rust on the padlock, a sentence arrives that she cannot get in front of fast enough, and the sentence is not about the chapel.

The sentence is: you made that up.

And behind that one is a worse one, and it is the reason she has not said any of this out loud for about fourteen months: if I made that up, what else have I made up.

Look at what the holding actually rests on

There is a sentence in Hebrews written for people in exactly this position, and it does a thing with its grammar that most of us read straight past.

Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;)Hebrews 10:23

Hold fast, it says. Fine. Everyone knows that bit. Now look at the reason it gives in the brackets, because the reason is the whole engine.

It does not say hold fast, for it is nearly here. It does not say hold fast, for the signs are good, or hold fast, because two years is not that long really, or hold fast, for the agency will be back in the spring. It gives one reason and it is a reason about a Person: He is faithful that promised.

Which means the grip is not being asked to rest on the padlock's behavior. It never was.

You are holding onto something that has never once depended on what the door does, and that is written, not softened. Hebrews 10:23 puts the whole weight of the holding on His faithfulness rather than on visible movement, and the Holy Spirit is the One pressing that distinction into a woman who has been reading a rusty shackle as a message. The door is not the message. The door is a door.

Two years of evidence, and what it is evidence about

Let us be honest about the padlock, because pretending it is not there is no use to anybody and this site does not do that.

Two years is long. The rust is real. The buddleia is real. Nothing has moved, and this is not a mood you can be talked out of with a nice thought, and I am not going to tell you what the shut door is for. I do not know. Nobody writing to you knows.

Here is what I do know, and it is the only thing that actually helps: a locked door is evidence about a door.

It is evidence that a hasp is fastened and a key is somewhere else. It is not evidence about God's character, His memory, His word, or your sanity, and the leap from the first thing to the second is made every day by good people and it is a leap over a canyon with nothing underneath.

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them.Hebrews 11:13

That verse is not comfortable. It is honest, which is better. And read what they were doing at the end: persuaded, and embracing. Not having received, and not one of them concluding that God had changed His mind.

Right now, as you read, you are not a woman who made things up, you are a woman standing in a gap, and Scripture has a whole chapter full of your relatives. That is His word and not my reassurance, and His Spirit is the One who takes Hebrews 11 off a page and puts it around a person at half seven in the morning on a wet lane.

What was sworn, and what any of us draw around it

There is a gentle thing to say here and I want to say it without laying a finger of blame on you, because the burden for this is mine and not yours.

When something from God lands in a person, it lands whole and it lands hot, and then a human mind does what human minds do: it starts drawing. It fills in the where and the when and the which building. That drawing is not sin. It is love trying to picture the thing. But the drawing is ours, and the promise is His, and they are not the same document.

So the question at the bend is not, did I make it up. The question is, which part of what I am holding did God actually swear.

He swore He would never leave you. He swore He is faithful that promised. He swore that the word out of His mouth does not come back empty. Those are not drawings. Those are sworn, and no padlock in England has any jurisdiction over them.

You have not lost the thing that was actually given to you, and it is already yours, whatever the ply on that window is doing. Scripture says His word does not return void, in Isaiah 55:11, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a sworn word stay solid in a person's hands during the exact season when nothing visible agrees with it.