The Crust Beside the Laundry Timer

For the one who has ruled out every room they actually occupy.

It's a quarter past nine on a Thursday night and there are eleven minutes left on the dryer, which is displayed in red on a panel about a foot above your head.

You're folding work clothes on a formica counter in a laundromat on a main road, under a strip light with one end flickering. There are two other people in here, both down at the far end, and neither of them is interested in anything except their own machines.

You've got a sandwich you didn't finish at lunch, and the crust of it is sitting on the paper beside your bag.

What arrives, while you are folding a work shirt at a quarter past nine, is a very clear memory of receiving bread and a cup years ago. A sentence follows it immediately and automatically, and the sentence says that this isn't a real place.

You've said that sentence, in one form or another, about every room you've occupied for four years.

You've been calling this not a real place, and He took bread in a borrowed room He did not own. The written word records where the first one happened, and the Spirit has not narrowed the list since.

The List of Rooms You Have Ruled Out

Assemble the list, because it's longer than you've realized and the length of it is the argument.

Your kitchen, because it's small and there is always washing on the airer. Your car, because it is a car. The break room at work, because somebody might come in and want the kettle. A bench by the canal, because it is outdoors and people walk past. Now a laundromat, because of the formica, the noise, and the two strangers at the far end.

Every one of those has been disqualified on the grounds of ordinariness. That is the actual criterion, though you have never once stated it out loud: the room is too ordinary, too domestic, too public, and altogether too much like the rest of your week.

Stated plainly it sounds obviously wrong, which is why it has survived four years without being stated. Unexamined criteria are durable precisely because nobody ever puts them into a sentence where they can be looked at.

Which leaves precisely one category of acceptable room, and it's a category you have no access to at the moment, which means the practical effect of your criterion is that you receive nothing anywhere.

Your criterion disqualifies every room you actually occupy. The written word puts the first one in a borrowed upper room, and the Spirit has kept the requirement where it was.

In Remembrance of Me

Here's the verse, and what's absent from it is as instructive as what's in it.

And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.Luke 22:19 (KJV)

He took bread. There's no description of the room in the sentence at all. Luke tells us elsewhere that it was an upper room in a house belonging to somebody else, prepared that afternoon by two disciples who'd been sent ahead to find it.

A borrowed room, arranged that same day, in a city full of visitors, on a night when the authorities were actively looking for Him. Nothing whatever about that setting was established, permanent, or particularly private.

If anything it was less suitable than a laundromat. Nobody in a laundromat is in danger, and the two people at the far end have no interest in who you are.

Luke wrote that about a borrowed room in an occupied city, and it reaches past that night to a laundromat with eleven minutes on the dryer.

The first room was borrowed, arranged that afternoon, and nobody described it. The written word leaves the setting out, and the Spirit has not put it back in.

What a Real Place Would Require

Press on the criterion, because it dissolves when you state it plainly.

For a room to qualify under your rule it would have to be quiet, dedicated to the purpose, occupied by the right sort of people, and free of anything ordinary. In practice that means a building that exists for this and nothing else.

Such buildings exist and they're good. But notice what you've done. You've taken a setting that developed over centuries and made it a precondition for something that was instituted in a borrowed dining room by a man with hours to live.

The precondition is younger than the practice by about three hundred years. You've been ruling out the original conditions in favor of a later arrangement, and doing it at some cost to yourself on a Thursday night.

You've made a later arrangement into a precondition for an older practice. The written word describes the original conditions, and the Spirit has kept them available.

I Am Not Telling You the Setting Is Irrelevant

Be fair, because there's something real in your instinct and it shouldn't be trampled.

Rooms do matter. A quiet place helps, a set apart place helps more, and there's a reason people have built them for two thousand years. If you can get somewhere quiet, get there.

Nor am I telling you that the noise and the strangers and the formica are nothing. They're genuinely unhelpful and you're right that it isn't ideal.

What I want off you is the ruling out. Not the wish for somewhere better. Not the memory of a room with others in it.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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