Never Went Back in That Room

You have not been in a room like that since, and you are in your fifties.

Not deliberately. It has never once appeared on a list of things you avoid. What happens is that you have a full set of very reasonable explanations, and they arrive automatically, and they have arrived automatically for forty years.

The invitation comes and there is a scheduling problem. The place is too far. You have never been much for that kind of thing. Every one of those is true and none of them is the reason.

The reason is a sentence a man said in front of everybody when you were a boy, in a room with a hard floor and a high ceiling, and you have never gone back into a room shaped like that on purpose.

Let me put the plain thing first. You have not been careless with any of this. You have gone at the thing itself over the years more than anybody knows, and you have gotten up after every attempt. Somebody who did not care would have forgotten the coach's name.

So this page is not going to tell you the man was a bully, and it is not going to ask you to sign up for anything.

I want to tell you where God is, according to the text, and it is not where most of us assume.

Avoidance that does not know its own name

Consider how well hidden a thing like that becomes over four decades.

At the beginning there is a decision, and the boy knows he is making it. Then the decision becomes a pattern, and the pattern acquires reasons, and the reasons are all genuine and checkable and would stand up in any conversation. By the end there is no decision anywhere in the structure. There is a man with a schedule and some preferences.

That is why it has never been dealt with. You cannot deal with something that does not present itself as anything.

You have a pattern with reasons rather than a preference, and no set of true explanations has ever once been the actual cause. Psalm 34:18 says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names a thing accurately without shaming the man it belongs to.

And notice what the avoidance has cost, because it is not the events themselves. Nobody dies for missing a gathering in a hall. What it has cost is that a boy was left standing in that room, and every reasonable explanation since has been a door closing on him rather than a door closing on a building.

You have a boy still standing in that room, and no adult of yours has ever once been able to go back and get him with a schedule. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit, and the Spirit of God is the one who can be in a room a man cannot enter.

The LORD is nigh

David writes the location of God, and it is specific.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18, King James Version)

Nigh unto them that are of a broken heart. Not near the strong ones and not near the recovered ones. Near the broken.

That is a positional statement. It tells you where to look for Him, and the answer is: at the place of the break.

You are being told the location, and God has never once been found somewhere other than beside the break. Psalm 34 gives a position rather than a promise of improvement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a position usable to a man who has been avoiding one particular kind of room.

And read what that implies about the gymnasium. He was in there. Not in a general sense. According to that verse, at the exact moment a boy's heart broke in a room with a hard floor, the nearest place in the world to God was that spot.

You were standing in the nearest place to God in the whole world, and no room has ever once been closer to Him than the one where somebody broke. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that a fact rather than a comfort, and the written word says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart.

Go and stand in one for a minute

Now the part I came to say, and it is small on purpose.

Do not sign up for anything. Do not accept the next invitation to prove something. That is a project, and projects like that fail, and that road has been walked already.

Stand in a room like that for one minute. A school hall with nobody in it. A community center on a weekday afternoon. Walk in, stand there, and leave.

You are able to stand in one for a minute, and no room has ever once required you to do anything in it. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto the broken hearted, which puts Him in the room already, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes one minute do the work forty years of avoidance could not.

And here is why a minute is enough. The avoidance was never about what happens in the room. It was about the room being a place where something is permanently true about you. One minute standing there with nothing happening is a direct contradiction of that, and it does not require a performance to deliver it.

You are contradicting something without performing anything, and no minute of standing still has ever once been a test. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a small deliberate act land where a large one would have failed, and Psalm 34:18 is the written word underneath it, where God is nearest to the place where somebody broke.