The Window In The Rented Flat

Ten past six in the morning, fourth floor, and the radiator has started its knocking.

Rania has been in this flat three years and two months. One bedroom, magnolia walls, a kitchen narrow enough to touch both sides of at once. The agency's inventory lists the blind, the extractor fan, and a mark on the bath that was there before she arrived. The tenancy says no nails, no adhesive hooks, no fixings of any kind in any wall.

So there is nothing of hers on any wall in this flat. Three years, and nothing.

Her mother's photograph is propped on the shelf against the books. The map from the year she traveled is rolled up in the wardrobe. The rug is hers, and so is the chipped blue mug with the gold rim mostly rubbed off it.

And the window is hers, because the window is the one part of this place that is not magnolia and does not belong to the agency. Fourth floor, facing east over the bus depot. At ten past six the depot lights are still on and the first buses are pulling out in a line, and there is a plane going over so high that it is only a scratch on the sky.

She stands there with the mug and she prays.

She has done this every morning for three years and two months. Out loud, quietly, in her own voice, with not much liturgy left in it. Mostly names. Her sister. Her sister's boy. The woman at work whose mother is not well. The drivers, because they are right there in front of her.

And every morning, somewhere around the fourth or fifth name, the thought arrives.

Does this count.

Because she remembers a room. Forty voices saying amen at the same moment, so that you felt it in your chest before you heard it. Somebody's hand on her shoulder afterward. The smell of the boiler cupboard by the door and the tea urn that took twenty minutes. She was in that room for eleven years and she loved it, and she is not in it now, for reasons that are hers, and she is not going to explain them to anybody at ten past six on a Tuesday.

But the thought keeps coming, and it comes dressed as humility, which is how the worst ones always arrive.

Maybe a prayer needs a room. Maybe it needs other people in it, and an amen from a mouth that is not yours, and a roof that somebody once dedicated. Maybe what she is doing at this window is not prayer at all. Maybe it is a woman talking to a bus depot with a mug in her hand.

She finishes anyway. She always finishes.

Then she rinses the mug, and gets in the shower, and goes to work, and does exactly the same thing again tomorrow.

Three years and two months. Nothing on the walls, and a voice going out of that window every single morning at ten past six.

A man on a hill, talking to strangers

I want to tell you at the start what this page will not do, so that you can read the rest of it without bracing.

I will not tell you to go back. I do not know your situation, I was not there for whatever happened, and a real person acts on what a page says to them, so a stranger who tells you what to do with your Sunday is being reckless with your life. Nor will I tell you that alone at a window is the finished shape of a life, because that would be the same recklessness pointing the other way, and I would be arranging your years from a distance to make a point.

There is one question in this that I can answer, and it happens to be the only one that was actually being asked at the fourth name. The question is whether He hears it.

So come and stand with Paul in Athens for a minute.

He is on a hill in the middle of the most religiously furnished city in the world, surrounded by shrines and altars and columns, and he is speaking to people with no shared vocabulary with him at all. And he tells them that God does not live in temples built by hands, and that He is not served by human hands as though He needed anything, and then he says this.

That they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us.Acts 17:27

Feel their way toward him. That is the phrase. It is the language of a person in a dark room with their hands out, which is very close to what praying at a window before the sun is properly up actually feels like on the average Tuesday.

And Paul does not describe that as a lesser kind of seeking. He describes it as the seeking that finds.

Take this into your hands before you read another line, because it is settled and it is not my opinion: you are near Him at that glass. There is exactly one measurement in that verse, distance, and the Holy Spirit had Paul answer it in the same breath He raised it, not far from each one of us, which is written and stands whether or not anyone said amen beside you this morning.

Now let me go at the fear directly, because it is not a small thought and it deserves better than reassurance.

You have been quietly running a threshold in your head. Two people, forty people, a dedicated roof, and then it counts. Look for that threshold in Scripture and it is not there. The promise about two or three gathered is a promise about what happens when people do gather, and it was never published as an entry requirement for being heard. Elijah on a mountain with nobody. Hannah moving her lips in a doorway while a priest watched and got her completely wrong. Daniel with the windows of his room open, on his knees, three times a day, in a city that was not his and a house that was not his either.

You have not been struck off, and there is no register with your name crossed out on it. What is written says the Lord is near to all who call on Him in truth, and a name spoken out of a fourth floor window over a bus depot is carried by His Spirit, which is why the sound of it landing does not depend on the number of people in the room.

And notice the shape of your own praying, because it tells on you. It is mostly names. Your sister, her boy, the woman at work, the drivers pulling out of the depot in a line. That is not a person circling their own situation. That is intercession, which is the work of somebody who belongs, and you have been doing it every morning for three years without a single person to see it.

You are His this morning, with nothing on the walls and no fixings permitted, and Scripture says you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, so the seal is on you and not on the building, and it went on before you moved into this flat and did not come off when you moved out of anywhere.