What You Assumed It Meant

Half six in the morning in a hall with the roof still dripping from last night, and the load is late, and everybody is standing around a stack of flight cases drinking coffee out of the same terrible machine.

The old boy on the rigging crew is called Tomas. He has been doing this longer than some of the crew have been alive. He does not shout, he does not rush, he is the only person in the building who can find anything, and when he goes up he goes up like a man walking to the shop.

And every single time, before he climbs, he stops.

He puts one hand on the stile of the ladder. He touches something at his collar, a bit of metal on a cord under his shirt, worn smooth. He crosses himself. He says something for about two seconds. Then he goes up.

Six years our man has been watching this from the other side of a hall.

And in six years he has built a whole man out of it. He has decided what Tomas thinks, what Tomas was taught, what Tomas believes about half a dozen things nobody has ever asked him about, and where all of that puts Tomas in relation to the whole business our man walked out of four years ago. It is a complete file. It has never once been opened by anybody but him.

Then comes this morning. The rain, the late load, and the crew short by two, so it is our man on the foot of the ladder, holding it, with his head about level with Tomas's boot.

Which means that for the first time in six years he is standing near enough to hear.

And what he hears, in the two seconds before that man goes up thirty feet in a wet hall on a Tuesday, is this.

Jesus. You went first. I am in Your hands.

That is it. That is the whole of it. Then the boot goes up past his ear and the ladder takes the weight and Tomas is away up into the dark of the grid to do the thing he has done four thousand times.

Our man stands there holding the ladder with both hands and his ears going hot.

Because he has said that sentence. Not the gesture. Not the metal on the cord. The sentence. He said it at the top of a ladder himself once, and at a bedside, and in a car park in the dark, and it is the exact shape of the last real prayer he prayed before everything got complicated.

Thirty feet up, somebody swears cheerfully about a bolt.

He is still holding the ladder.

What you actually knew about him

Straight to the awkward part, because you can feel it coming and leaving it sitting there would help nobody.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you what to think about what that man does before he climbs. Not one word of approval and not one word of correction. It is not this message's business, it is not being handled here in either direction, and that promise holds for every line below this one. Six years of assuming does not get answered by six paragraphs of assuming pointed the other way.

And the things the two of you do not hold in common are still not held in common. Nobody here is shrinking them for you. Some of them are real and some of them matter and neither of you could talk your way through them before lunch, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of lie, the warm kind, which is the sort you should trust least.

So put all of that down for a moment, because it is not what happened at the foot of that ladder.

What happened is that you found out you had never been close enough to hear.

There is a man in Acts who had a file too. Peter. Certain, devout, sure he knew exactly who was in and who was out, and correct about a great deal. God gives him a vision he argues with, and then sends him to a house he would not have entered on any other morning, and Peter walks into that room and opens his mouth and says something that costs him.

Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.Acts 10:34-35

Of a truth I perceive. Which is a man saying, out loud, in front of witnesses, that he has just this minute understood something he did not understand at breakfast.

You are in that room too. Not corrected, not caught out, invited in. Acts 10:34 is written down for people exactly like you, and the same Spirit who walked Peter over that threshold was at the foot of your ladder this morning, standing exactly where you were standing.

Now, what your six years were actually made of, because I do not think it was malice and I do not think it was even doctrine.

It was distance. That is all. You had never been within earshot.

From the far side of a hall you can see a gesture. You cannot hear a sentence. And a gesture is exactly the kind of thing a lonely and tired man can build an entire person out of, and every version he builds will be somebody he does not have to hope anything about.

You have not been running a system. You have been running an assumption, and there is a great deal of daylight between those two words. The word of God says the Lord looks on the heart while man looks on the outward appearance, in 1 Samuel 16:7, and the Spirit who wrote that line is not shocked at you this morning. He walked you over to the foot of that ladder.

And hear what you are being handed, because it is not a settlement and it is not a shrug.

It is a floor. One sentence wide. Jesus, You went first, I am in Your hands. That sentence is being said this morning by people who would disagree with each other about a great deal, in languages neither of you speak, in rooms neither of you would recognize, and it is being said by a rigger thirty feet above your head, and it was said by you in a car park in the dark on the worst night of your life.

You have never been the last one holding this. That is not sentiment, it is what is written in Romans 10:12, that there is no difference, for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him. None of it runs on who says it best. It runs on His Spirit, and He carries every one of those sentences up out of every room they are said in.

None of that has settled a single disputed thing between you and that man. It was never trying to. It has only told you the truth about how many people are standing on the floor you thought you were on alone.