Two Chairs and a Whiteboard

The kettle in that room has a lid that does not sit right and everybody knows to hold it, and every few months somebody says they will bring one in from home and nobody ever does.

Two chairs, a table with a wobble corrected by a folded rota, and a whiteboard with the night's jobs on it in three different colors of marker because two of the pens have dried out. That is the tea room. That is the whole of it.

At two in the morning there are usually three of them in there for twenty minutes. The one who has been on this job since 1997 and can tell you what every corridor was called before the rebuild. The one from the agency who has an opinion about biscuits that everybody finds unreasonable. And, sometimes, him.

Mostly not him.

Mostly he takes his twenty minutes out by the lift lobby on the second floor, standing up, with a flask he brings himself. He is not sulking and nobody has fallen out with him. If you asked those two men about him they would say he is one of the good ones, and mean it, and if he walked in right now they would move a chair.

The reason he is not in there is that there is one thing about him that nobody in that hospital knows, and somewhere along the way he decided that carrying it meant standing somewhere else. Not because anybody would guess. Because being in a warm room with people who are talking about their lives has come to feel, to him, like a kind of exposure.

Sit down with me here, and let me say the most important sentence first so you can hear the rest of it properly. I am not going to ask you to tell anybody. Not tonight, not in six months, not as a braver version of yourself later on. I am not going to guess what it is, and I am not going to offer you a list. Nothing here wants the thing itself, and a man who never tells another living person is a whole man and a whole reader of this site.

The hiding place is a Person, not a corridor

In my grandmother's house there was a wide covered porch, and in the heat everybody sat in it, and the point of it was not that you could not be seen there. Everybody could see you. The point was that you were under something.

That is nearly the whole of this psalm.

Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.Psalm 32:7

Thou art my hiding place. Not a room. Not a corridor. Not the second floor lift lobby at two in the morning with a flask. A Person, addressed in the second person, who is Himself the shelter.

And then look at the next clause, because it does something nobody expects. Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Compass me about means surrounded, ringed, on every side. Songs, in the plural, which means voices, which means other people.

The man in that psalm is hidden and surrounded at the same time. Those are not opposites in God, and the fact that they have become opposites in you is the injury this message is about.

You are hidden in God right now, and you were never sent out of the room to get it. I am not offering you a warm thought there. The written word puts the hiding and the surrounding in the same verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page and puts it into a man standing up with a flask at two in the morning.

Hidden is a location, and it is not a distance

Here is the substitution that happened, and it happened so gradually that no decision was ever made.

You needed to be covered. That was right and it is still right, and there is nothing wrong with a man keeping a thing that is his to keep. But covered is not a place you can stand; it is a thing that has to be over you. So you did what a person does when there is no covering available. You put distance where the covering should have been, and distance does a rough impression of it, and it costs you every warm room you have ever walked past.

God is not offering you more distance. He is offering to be the thing over you, and a man with something over him can walk into a tea room.

You are covered rather than removed, and you have that covering already rather than at the end of a process. Scripture says He covers us and under His wings we take refuge, and it is His Spirit, not a decision made in a corridor, who lets a covered man sit down in company.