A Minority Interest

She has started carrying it the way you carry a hobby that nobody else has.

Not with shame. She would want that said. She is not embarrassed and she does not hide it, and if it comes up at work she says so without dropping her voice.

It is smaller than shame and much harder to put down.

It is the sense that she is part of something that used to be large and is now a remainder. That she belongs to a thing which is, in the world she can actually see, a small and shrinking interest held by a diminishing number of mostly older people, and that being sincere about it is a bit like being sincere about brass bands.

She has never once said that out loud. It would sound disloyal, and it is not disloyalty, it is arithmetic. She counts the cars in the car park. She notices the age of the room. She reads the numbers when the numbers are published.

And what it has done, over about nine years, is not weaken what she believes. It has shrunk where she believes it. Her faith has become an indoor thing, the size of one building, held carefully, like something kept out of the weather.

So let me ask you, out here where the wind is.

When did you start carrying it as a small thing?

He said it into an empty room

There is a sentence at the very end of the Old Testament that I have never got over, and the reason is entirely to do with when it was said.

Malachi is the last of them. The temple is running, technically. The offerings are being made, technically. But the whole book is a picture of a tired religion in a small province: the priests are bored, the animals brought are the ones nobody wanted, and God's complaint is not that the people are wicked so much as that everybody has stopped expecting anything.

It is the emptiest room in the Old Testament.

And into that, God says this.

My name will be great among the nations, from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to My name, because My name will be great among the nations, says the Lord Almighty.Malachi 1:11

You are standing exactly where that was spoken, and the Spirit who carried it to a tired province is the same One in you on a cold morning in a half-full building, which means the size in that sentence was never a report on the room it was said in.

Read where it puts the boundary. From the rising of the sun to where it sets. That is not a large area. That is all of them.

And He says it in a province the size of a county, to people counting the cars.

Now, gently, because I think you have been carrying this alone for a while.

Your arithmetic is not wrong. That is the part nobody says to you and it is the reason the encouragement usually slides off. You can count. The car park is emptier than it was and the room is older than it was and you are not imagining any of it.

What is wrong is the conclusion, and specifically the size of the sample.

The word says from the rising of the sun to its setting, and the Spirit has been at work this week in more languages than there are people in your building, and the thing you are counting is one room in one town on one morning.

You have not been believing something small. You have been standing at a very small window.