Standing Next To The Wrong Opinion

She could not tell you what the first three songs were this morning. She could tell you exactly where he was standing.

Third row from the front, left hand side, the aisle seat, which is where he always is, and she is eleven rows back on the other side, which is not where she always was.

The meeting was in March.

It was not a row. That is what makes it so difficult to explain to anybody, including herself. It was a perfectly civil meeting about a perfectly ordinary matter, and he said what he thought, at some length and with complete conviction, and about four other people nodded, and it went the way it went and everybody had coffee afterwards.

She has not sung properly since.

Here is what actually happens now, every Sunday, and she has watched herself do it eleven weeks running.

She comes in. She locates him before she has taken her coat off. She chooses where to sit in relation to him. And then, throughout, there is a low background process running that costs about fifteen per cent of her, monitoring the room, and it is going during the singing and the reading and the prayers and the bit she used to love.

She is not angry with him. She would say that honestly. She has no interest in a confrontation and she does not want him to leave and she would be horrified if he did.

She has simply, without deciding to, started attending a room that has him in it, instead of attending church.

And last Sunday, during the last song, she caught sight of him with his eyes shut and both hands open, and something in her chest went sideways, and she has not known what to do with that at all.

Keep the unity. You did not make it.

Sit down at the back for a minute, because there is an instruction in Ephesians with a verb in it that changes what is being asked of you.

Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.Ephesians 4:3

Keep it.

Not build it. Not achieve it, not negotiate it, not restore it once everybody has come round. Keep, which is what you do with a thing that already exists and was handed to you.

And whose unity is it? The unity of the Spirit. It has an owner and the owner is not the congregation, which means it was not made by agreement in the first place and it does not dissolve when agreement fails.

Hear this eleven rows back. You have not lost anything, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture says the unity is the Spirit's and your job is to keep it, and the Holy Spirit made that bond in March and did not take it away during a perfectly civil meeting.

Now let me name the fifteen per cent, because that is the actual injury and it is not being caused by him.

He is not doing anything to you on a Sunday. He sits in the third row and he shuts his eyes and he sings. Whatever was said in March was said in March and has not been repeated once.

What is costing you is the monitoring, and monitoring is not something that happens to a person. It is something a person runs, and it runs on a decision so old and so quiet you have never actually seen it: that you must know where he is.

Hear this too. You are not a hypocrite for coming, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the whole thing on the Spirit and asks you only to keep it, and the Spirit of God has been in that room every one of the eleven Sundays you spent partly outside it.

And now the thing you saw last Sunday, because that is not an accident and it is not going to leave you alone.

You saw a man with his eyes shut and his hands open. You saw somebody worshipping, plainly and privately, in front of everybody.

That is what went sideways in your chest. It was not sentiment. It was the collision of the two things you have been keeping in separate rooms since March: that he is wrong, in your honest and considered view, about something you care about; and that God is at work in him, visibly, eleven rows in front of you, on a Sunday.

Both of those are true. The written word puts people exactly like that in one body on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by the arrangement.