The Lights Across the Inlet

For the believer who watches other households pray from across the water and counts himself outside.

It's 9:40 on a Tuesday evening in November, and the lights on the far shore have been on for about twenty minutes.

You know three of those houses. The one with the porch lamp belongs to a family who read a chapter together after supper and have done since their eldest was small. The one further along is a woman on her own whose kitchen light burns later than anybody else's on that shore, and has done since her husband died.

Between you and all three there's about a mile of cold water, a road that goes the long way round, and the ordinary fact that you've never once been inside any of those kitchens.

So you stand at the window and do the arithmetic you always do. They have it. You watch it. The water is the difference, and the water isn't going anywhere.

Except you prayed tonight too. You prayed twenty minutes ago, at almost exactly the hour their lamps came on, and it didn't occur to you to count yourself among the lights.

A mile of water is a distance rather than a verdict. It is written that believers into one body without measuring the miles between them, and the Spirit joins what geography keeps apart.

Distance Feels Like a Ruling

Here's what distance does to a person over time, and it's worth naming because it works quietly.

Distance starts as a fact. A mile of water is only a mile of water. Then, because you see other people gathered and you aren't gathered with them, the fact slowly turns into a verdict about you. You stop saying the water is wide and start saying you're outside.

Nobody argues you into that. It settles on you the way cold settles in a house nobody is heating, and by the time you notice it you've been sitting in it for most of a season.

That's the difficulty with a conclusion nobody ever stated out loud. There's no sentence to go back and examine, no moment when somebody told you where you stood, and nothing to disagree with except a feeling that has been thickening since about March.

The trouble is that a verdict feels like information. It arrives with the authority of something you worked out for yourself, and self-issued verdicts are the hardest kind to appeal.

You're inside a body distance has no power to rule on, because the joining was never geographic. Scripture's letters make the body one in Christ rather than one in a location, and the Spirit holds that across every mile of water you can see from a window.

One Body, and Who Made It One

The sentence worth holding is short, and it was written to people scattered across a difficult city.

Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.1 Corinthians 12:27 (KJV)

There's no address in it. No attendance, no frequency, no roof. The only location named is Christ, and you didn't have to travel in order to get there.

Those words went first to a congregation in Corinth, a port town full of people passing through, and they carry across to a northern inlet without losing anything. What makes the body one is a Person rather than a postcode, and a Person can hold two shores at once without straining.

So the far lights aren't a picture of something you lost. They're other members, in other rooms, in the same body as you, doing at 9:40 what you were doing at 9:20.

You're one body with people you've never sat beside, and Christ holds both ends of it. The written Word's sentence locates the body in Him rather than in a building, and the Spirit makes that a present tie on a cold Tuesday.

The Water Was Never Assigned a Meaning

Here's something about water that's worth holding as settled, and it matters at a window.

An inlet looks like a barrier from a window. From a boat it's a road. The same water that divides two shores for somebody standing still is the fastest way between them for anybody who moves on it. Nothing about the water changed. The relationship to it did.

That isn't a trick of attitude, and I'm not asking you to feel better about a mile. I'm saying the water was never assigned a meaning by the water. You assigned it one, and you assigned it the harshest available.

Tonight you could assign it the true one instead. The lights aren't on the other side of a wall. They're on the far bank of a road you're already standing on.

You can look at the same distance and stop reading it as exclusion. Christ never read it that way, and nothing obliges you to keep reading it the way you have been.

I Am Not Sending You Across the Water

Be clear about what this won't do, because the easy ending would be dishonest.

I'm not going to tell you to drive round the inlet and knock on a door. If that happens one day and it's good, I'll be glad. But if you never cross, if those three kitchens stay kitchens you've never entered, nothing said here tonight comes undone.

Nor am I setting your window above their rooms. They have something real. You have something real. Ranking the two would only replace your verdict with a different verdict, and you've had enough of those.

What I want taken off you is the word outside. Not the water. The word.

You can keep the distance and lose the verdict, because only one of the two was ever true. The written word never makes nearness the test of membership, and the Spirit keeps you a member while the mile stays exactly as wide as it is.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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