The Candle Between Two Doorways

For the believer who prayed with a neighbor in a power cut and cannot believe it counted.

Suppose the power goes at about twenty to eight on a Wednesday, and the whole road falls quiet at once in the way that only electricity going out can manage.

A woman opens her front door to see whether it's only her house. The neighbor two doors along is doing exactly the same, and they meet in the middle of the pavement with one candle between them, because she's the sort who keeps candles.

They stand in her doorway. Darkness makes people say more than they'd planned, and the neighbor mentions that her son hasn't spoken to her since March. She's never told anybody on that road anything at all.

The woman with the candle hasn't any advice to offer. She asks whether it would be all right to pray, and the neighbor says yes in the voice of somebody who didn't expect to be asked.

Ninety seconds. Two names, one of them a son's. Then the lights come back across the whole road at once, both women laugh, and the neighbor goes home.

Christ stood in that doorway, and ninety seconds was a meeting rather than a gesture. Scripture says so. His promise is recorded at the number two, and the Spirit is what makes a doorway the midst of them.

Why Easy Reads as Small

You have a rule running quietly in the background, and it says that anything short, easy and unplanned can't have amounted to very much.

That rule isn't stupid. It comes out of a genuine observation about the world, where most valuable outcomes really do cost time and careful preparation. It simply doesn't transfer to this, and nobody ever told you where it stops applying.

Rules like that are inherited rather than chosen, which is why they are so hard to argue with. You didn't sit down one afternoon and decide that brevity meant shallowness. You absorbed it from a hundred ordinary situations where it happened to be true, and then carried it into the one place where it isn't.

So ninety seconds in a doorway gets filed by you under kindness, which is a good file and the wrong one. It was kindness, and nobody's disputing that. It was also a gathering with Christ standing inside it, and those two facts aren't competing for the same slot.

I'd go further than that. The reason it worked at all is that it was ordinary. A woman who'd told nobody on that road anything told a neighbor in a doorway, because doorways in the dark are where people say true sentences and well lit platforms are not.

Nothing shrank because it was easy, since the promise was never priced by effort. The written Word's sentence as written names two in His name without a word about preparation, and the Spirit moves in ninety seconds as readily as in ninety minutes.

Two, in His Name, in the Midst

The verse is short, and it doesn't flatter anybody by making the terms difficult to reach.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.Matthew 18:20 (KJV)

Count what's required of you. There are two people in it, plus His name. Nothing else appears anywhere: not later in the paragraph, not in the letters that afterwards explain what He meant.

He also put Himself in the midst, which is a physical word rather than a comforting one. Not watching. Not approving from a distance. Not present in the way we mean when we tell somebody our thoughts are with them. In the middle of the two of them, in the doorway, beside the candle.

Those words went first to disciples being taught how to handle a dispute inside a community, and they reach a road in a power cut without anybody having to stretch them.

He was in the middle of that doorway, and the midst is a position rather than a sentiment. Scripture's promise stands recorded at two in His name, and the Spirit made it true before the lights came back.

What It Cost Her to Ask

There's something fierce and gentle to say here at the same time, because this part of it gets passed over.

Asking whether you may pray for somebody isn't nothing. It costs. There's a half second between the question and the answer in which you can be refused, or laughed at, or filed permanently as the religious neighbor, and everybody who's ever asked knows that half second intimately.

She asked anyway, in the dark, of a woman she barely knew, about a son. That took more courage than most of what happens in a well lit room with an order of service and a printed sheet.

So when you file the evening under ordinary, you are also filing away a moment where somebody risked something real for a stranger's sake. It deserves a better word than ordinary, and it doesn't need a larger room in order to deserve one.

You'd see that instantly if somebody else had done it. Told about a neighbor who asked a grieving woman on a dark step whether she could pray, you would call it brave without hesitating for a moment. The only reason it looks small to you is that your own courage is the one thing you have never been able to watch from outside.

A brave moment stays brave at ninety seconds, and the brevity took nothing away from it. Scripture as written honors what's done in His name without once measuring its length, and the Spirit supplied the courage inside that half second.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Imani This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.