The Room You Keep Going Back To

Cath was twenty two, and it happened on a staircase.

Not a beautiful staircase. Concrete steps in a hall of residence, painted that particular institutional green, with a strip light that buzzed and a smell of other people's cooking coming up the stairwell. One in the morning. She had come out of a room she did not want to be in, at the end of a year she has never described to anybody in full, and she sat down on the fourth step from the bottom because her legs had made the decision for her.

And God met her there.

She will not use bigger words than that, and she is right not to. Something came into that stairwell that was not her, and it was warm, and it knew her, and she sat on a concrete step for about twenty minutes with her arms round her knees and her face wet and something in her chest that had been clenched since she was fifteen simply let go.

She is forty one now.

And here is what she has done with the nineteen years in between, and she would tell you herself, wincing, if you asked her gently enough.

She has been trying to get back into that stairwell.

Not always literally. Although once, actually literally: she drove three hours to the campus on a Saturday four years ago, and they had refurbished the block, and the stairwell was carpeted and had a keypad on the door, and she sat in the car park afterwards and felt like an idiot and cried in a completely different way.

Mostly it is smaller than that. It is the same album, because that album was playing on somebody's stereo through a wall that night. It is the chair by the radiator, at one in the morning specifically, because one in the morning is when it happened. It is the going away weekends, and the front row, and the hands up, and the waiting, and the checking, and the awful private inventory afterwards: was that it, was that anything, that was not it.

Nineteen years of a woman auditioning rooms.

And then, three weeks ago, on a Wednesday, at twenty to seven in the morning, she was scraping the black off a slice of toast with the radio on low and one of her sons shouting about a lost sock upstairs.

And she said, out loud, to nobody, in the middle of the scraping: right, come on, it is going to be a long one today.

And then she stopped, with the knife in her hand, because she heard who she had said it to.

New every morning has a date on it

I need to say something before I say anything else, because I know how this can land.

That night on the stairs was real. I am not about to reinterpret it, or explain it down, or tell you that the feeling was incidental. He met her. She was not making it up, and neither were you, and if anybody has ever made you feel foolish for the best night of your life they were wrong to.

But here is what I want to put in your hands.

There was a man, a long time ago, who went to a meeting he did not particularly want to attend, and while somebody was reading aloud his heart was strangely warmed. He wrote it down, and the phrase outlived him by centuries. And do you know what is remarkable about him? It is not the warmth. Plenty of people have had the warmth.

It is that he did not spend the next fifty years trying to get back into that room.

He went to the prisons. He went to the mines. He got up in the dark and rode in the rain and stood on his father's gravestone to preach because they would not let him inside, and organized people into small groups who told each other the truth every week whether they felt anything or not. The warmth had feet. It went somewhere. It did not become a place he kept driving back to.

Now hear what God says about mornings, because this is the ground under all of it.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 to 23

Take that in the kitchen you are actually in. You are met this morning by mercies dated today. The word says they are new every morning, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been bringing them into nineteen years of ordinary mornings.

Read the middle of that. New every morning.

Not renewed. Not topped up. Not the same mercy being reissued in a slightly worn condition. New, on a daily rhythm, which means there is one with today's date on it, and it is not the one from the stairwell, and it was never supposed to be.

And notice where that sentence comes from. Lamentations. A man sitting in the wreckage of a burned city, writing the saddest book in the Bible, who says this in the middle of it, on a morning when absolutely nothing felt warm. He is not describing a feeling. He is describing a supply.

That is your release, and I want to say it plainly so you can hear it: you are not required to reproduce anything.

Not the stairwell. Not the album. Not the one in the morning. Not the tears. You have been treating one night as the sample you have to match, and every ordinary Wednesday since has been quietly graded against it and found wanting, and that is nineteen years of being disappointed in a God who has been standing in your kitchen the whole time.

He is not rationing Himself to your best night. He met you then because that is what He is like, and being what He is like is not something He does once.

And before the story, hear what is written over you: you are met this morning, in this kitchen, by mercies dated today. His word says they are new every morning, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been bringing them into nineteen years of ordinary mornings you walked straight past.