It is always the left one.
Whatever else changes about a Sunday morning, whatever the season, whatever the weather, whatever anybody has decided this week about socks, there will come a moment at approximately twenty past nine in which one shoe cannot be found, and it is the left one, and it has been the left one since the beginning of recorded history. It is not under the sofa. It has been under the sofa four times and everybody has now learned to check there first, which is precisely why it is never there any more.
Then the coat negotiation, which is a separate diplomatic event with its own history. Then the bag. The bag contains: emergency snacks, a spare pair of the wrong-size trousers, a small toy that must not be lost under any circumstances, wipes, and a book somebody insisted on and will not look at once. Then the car seat straps, which have been adjusted by a person unknown, and the small archaeological process of working out which small human last sat in that seat and why the straps are now at the setting for a much larger one.
Then the car. Then the road. Then the car park, and the walk across it, one hand holding a hand, one hand holding everything else, and there is somebody at the door who is one of the genuinely lovely ones and who says, brightly and with total warmth, you made it!
And you say just about, and you both laugh, and neither of you is talking about the same thing at all.
It does not matter here why you do it on your own. This article is not going to ask, it is not going to guess, and it is not going to build a single sentence on top of an assumption about your household. On your own is simply the fact, and it is the fact for an enormous number of people who will read this, and it is not the exceptional case that needs explaining. It is a Sunday.
And then you sit down.
That is the moment. Not the shoe, not the straps, not the car park. The moment is the sitting down, when the room fills and the first song starts and everybody around you takes a breath and lifts their head, and you discover that the tank went empty somewhere between the hallway and the door, and there is nothing in you at all.
You are not sad. You are not even particularly upset about it. You are just finished, at the exact instant the thing you came for begins, and this has been happening for so long that you have quietly concluded you have not properly been at a service in about four years. You have attended dozens. Present at none.
That is the ache in this, and I have not come to tell you to get up earlier.
The clause in the verse that is about you
There is a verse everybody knows half of.
The half everybody knows is the lambs. God as a shepherd, gathering the lambs with His arm, carrying them against His chest. It gets read at services for small children and it is printed under pictures of sheep, and it is true and lovely and entirely deserved.
Then there is the other half of the sentence, which is a separate clause, about a completely different animal.
He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11
Those that are with young. The ewe. The one who is not being carried, because she is the one doing the carrying, and who therefore cannot be picked up and must instead be led, and led at a particular speed, and the verse is careful to tell you what speed. Gently.
You are led, and the pace was set to yours. That is the plain sense of Isaiah 40:11, which puts the loaded animal into the sentence on purpose and gives her her own verb, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that clause off a page of ancient poetry and lays it across a woman sitting down in a row with nothing left in her.
Stay with what a shepherd actually does with a flock like that, because it is the most practical thing in the passage. A flock does not travel at the speed of its strongest animal. It cannot. It travels at the speed of the one carrying the most, and every shepherd who has ever lived has known it, and the ones who did not know it lost animals. The pace of the whole thing is set by her.
You have been carried on every one of those mornings, and not one of them was got through alone. It is written that He gathers with His arm and leads with His voice in the same breath, and the Spirit is the One who does that leading in a hallway at twenty past nine, which is why you keep arriving at a building you have no strength to reach.
Nothing began without you
Here is the thing I most want to put in your hands, and it will sound too simple at first.
The gathering already happened.
Not at the door. Not when the first song started. The gathering happened in the hallway, in the car, in the negotiation about the coat, in the hand you were holding across the car park. That was not the toll you paid to get to worship. In the accounting heaven keeps, it was the worship, and you have been reading it as the queue.
You are not behind, and there is no part of the morning you turned up too late for. Scripture says God looks at the heart rather than at the outward appearance, and His Spirit is not standing at the front of a room waiting to see who arrives with something left over, because He was in the car with you and He has never once needed to be caught up on the journey.
And I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this message that would quietly hand you more to carry. Your exhaustion is your offering, so keep going. No. That sentence dressed up as encouragement is another weight on a woman who is already at the limit, and I am not putting it on you. The point is not that your tiredness is beautiful. The point is that the One you came to meet has been beside you all morning and is not conducting an assessment at nine forty five.
You have not missed anything. Psalm 139:5 says He has beset us behind and before and laid His hand upon us, and the Holy Spirit is the One who applies a verse like that at the precise moment a person sits down and discovers she is empty, because a God who is behind and before is not a God who starts at the top of the hour.
You did not arrive late to the presence of God this morning.
Read that slowly, because your body has spent four years disagreeing with it. There is no moment at which He begins. There is no threshold in that building on the other side of which He is finally available, and there has never been a single Sunday on which He waited at the front while you did the hallway on your own. The shepherd in that verse is not standing at the destination shouting encouragement. He is walking beside the loaded animal, at her speed, all the way.
You were already gathered, and the gathering did not depend on what you had left. That is what the written word promises about the way He keeps a flock, and the Spirit is the One who makes it a felt thing rather than a fine idea, which is why the emptiness that arrives when you sit down is not evidence of an absence, and never was.
So let the first song be what it is. If you sit through it with nothing, sit through it with nothing. You are not spectating at your own faith. You are the ewe in the verse, and the verse has a clause for you, and the clause has a speed in it, and the speed is His decision rather than yours.
The tank being empty at nine forty five is not a failure of devotion. It is arithmetic. And the One who wrote the clause about the loaded animal is not confused by arithmetic.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at that table, sitting down. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the standing to say them is not something a good morning earns and not something a bad one takes away: Scripture settled it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries it into a body that has been running since twenty past nine. The mountain here is not your household. It is a verdict that got in years ago and said that arriving empty means arriving late. Speak to that, and however He answers and whatever next Sunday does with the left shoe, the pace of this flock was already set to you.
- Sunday morning, you are a hallway and a car seat and one missing shoe, and you are not the toll on my worship. Scripture says He gently leads those that are with young, and in the name of Jesus I sit down in that row already gathered.
- Fear that He wants a rested version of me, you have had my first song for years and you are out of that row. The written word says He carries the lambs and leads the one who is carrying them, the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that mine on an empty tank, and you have nothing left to hold over me.
- Lord, You were in the hallway and You were in the car, and You have never once started without me. You are the Shepherd who sets the pace of the whole flock to the one carrying the most, and I thank You out loud with nothing left, because nothing left was never the entry requirement.
Isaiah 40:11
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