I Left The Church I Met Him In

He drives a different way to work now, which adds nine minutes, and he has never explained this to his wife.

The old route goes past it. Brick, a car park with a bad camber, a sign that was out of date the whole time he was there. And in that building, at twenty-six, in a Tuesday evening meeting with maybe thirty people in it, he came to know God in a way he has never had words for and has never had again.

He was there eighteen years.

And he left four years ago, and the leaving was not clean and it was not dramatic either. There was a situation. He was not the wronged party in it, not entirely, and he will say that. Things were handled in a way he could not live with, and he raised it, and he was heard politely, and nothing changed, and after about a year of coming in on Sundays with a stone in his chest he stopped coming in.

Nobody chased him. That is its own separate wound and it is not the one on this page.

Here is the one on this page.

He believes he left God in that building.

Not as a metaphor. He believes the Presence he met at twenty-six is attached to that room and those people and whatever was happening in it, and that when he walked out he walked away from the source, and that everything since has been a man living on the far side of a decision he made himself.

He goes somewhere else now. It is fine. Everything about it is fine, and nothing has ever happened in it, and he has stopped expecting it to.

And that is you taking your own long way round, or you would not still be reading.

Paul says this to a city full of buildings

Paul stood in Athens, which had more religious architecture per square foot than anywhere in the ancient world, and told them where God is not.

The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.Acts 17:24, 27

Read the second half slowly, because it is the one that answers you.

Not far from each one of us. Not near to the temple. Not concentrated at the good address. Distributed to persons, one at a time, and Paul says it standing in a city where everybody assumed the opposite.

He is not making a point about architecture for its own sake. He is telling people who thought presence had a location that it has never had one.

You are not far from Him, and there was never a building that held Him for you. It is written that He does not live in temples made by man, yet He is actually not far from each one of us (Acts 17:24, 27). The Holy Spirit was not left behind in a room with a bad car park.

Now the thing you have really concluded, underneath the geography, because the geography is not actually your belief.

What you believe is that the presence was on the room, and that you were a guest of it. That is why you can drive nine minutes further and not go past the building: not because God is inside, but because you cannot bear the sight of the place you think you used to be somebody in.

But what happened at twenty-six did not happen to the room. Rooms do not get indwelt. Thirty people were in that meeting and the thing that happened, happened in one of them, and he took it out through the door with him and has been carrying it for twenty-two years without knowing.

You are the one it happened to, and it has never once been a fixture in a building. It is written, do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you (1 Corinthians 3:16), which relocates the temple language onto a person and off a structure. The Holy Spirit came out of that car park in a man who thought he was leaving empty handed.

And the last thing, plainly, and nothing follows it.

He is with you in the church you go to now, the fine one where nothing happens. He was with you the whole four years. He was with you in the year of Sundays with a stone in your chest, and He was with you on the last morning, in the car park with the bad camber.

You are not cast off, and there is no route back that has to be driven first. It is written that He has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never has no clause in it about the ones who walked out of somewhere. The Holy Spirit has been with you every mile of the nine minutes.