The Back Row Is Not the Cheap Seats

Second row from the back. Aisle end. Door side.

Not the actual back row, because the back row is where the sound desk lives and where the older teenagers sit with their coats on like they might leave at any moment and never do. The one in front of it. And if somebody has taken it, there is a small unreasonable flare of something you would rather not name.

The bag is packed the night before. Raisins in the pot with the lid that a two year old cannot open, which is the entire point, and which also means that on a bad morning nobody can open it. Two quiet toys, selected on the single strict criterion that neither of them makes a noise when dropped onto a wooden floor. A spare pair of trousers, on account of the week that is not discussed. Wipes.

And you know the timings of that room the way a sound engineer knows a hall. First song, fine. Second song, better than fine, arms up, being carried, delighted with everything. Notices, borderline. Then somebody says the words "so I've got three things I want to say this morning", and from that sentence there are perhaps ninety seconds of goodwill remaining, and the decision gets made standing up, sideways, with a bag on one shoulder and a child on the opposite hip and a coat left over the back of the chair as a claim on a seat you are probably not getting back to.

Out through the fire door with the bar that clacks.

You know that corridor better than the inside of the hall. The noticeboard with the poster for the thing that happened in March. The radiator that ticks when the heating comes on. The exact acoustics of a talk heard through a closed fire door, which give you the rhythm of it and none of the words: the laugh when everyone laughs, and you laugh too, a beat late, at a joke you did not hear, while a small person tries to get the lid off the raisins.

A year and a half of rhythm and no words.

Here is what makes it awkward to explain. Nobody has made you feel bad about this. Not once. They are kind. Somebody always says he's no trouble, honestly, we love having him. Somebody saved you a seat in the middle of a row once and you had to explain, gently, and while smiling, that the aisle end by the door is not a preference, it is infrastructure.

So the pressure is not coming from them. It is coming from inside you, and it says something like this: everyone else in that room is being fed, and I am being fed nothing, and I have started to wonder whether I am still part of what happens in there, or whether I have quietly become the person who brings the child who is part of it.

That is the sentence that comes out of the corridor with you and gets in the car. This one is yours.

The gentlest line in the whole book

There is a sentence about the way God moves a group of people along, and I have never once heard it read out at a parenting event, which seems a waste.

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

Read the last clause again slowly.

Not lead the flock and hope the ones with young keep up. Not set a good brisk pace at the front and let the stragglers sort themselves out at the back. You are not standing at the edge of this because somebody put you there. Scripture says He gathers the lambs in His arm and gently leads those that are with young, which means the pace of the entire flock is set by whoever is currently carrying somebody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that off a page and lays it on a woman standing next to a ticking radiator at twenty five past ten.

The pace is set at the back. That is not a concession made to the back. That is the shepherd's own method, written down about Him before anybody thought to be embarrassed about needing it.

You have not missed what God is doing in you this year. There is a difference between missing the talk and missing God, and Scripture never treats the two as the same thing: the written word went out to people who could not read a line of it and got it in fragments, at wells, in fields, over the noise of other people's children, and it did its work in them anyway. The Holy Spirit is not confined to the fourteen minutes you were actually in the chair.

That does not make the loss nothing. It is a real loss and it deserves to be called one. Eighteen months of half sentences is a long time to be hungry in a building full of food.

But hunger is not exile. They are two different things and the corridor has been quietly telling you they are the same.

What the corridor is actually costing, and what it is not

The cost is real, and naming it properly is most of the work.

It costs concentration, which is the thing you have least of. It costs the ordinary pleasure of finishing a thought. It costs the conversations afterwards, since the eleven minutes everyone else spends over coffee are the eleven minutes it takes to find one shoe. And it costs something harder to say: the low background sense that your faith is on hold for a few years and will be picked up later, when there is time, like a course you deferred.

You were counted into this body before you ever heard the end of a sentence in it. Paul writes that the members of the body which seem to be more feeble are necessary, and it is a structural claim rather than a kindness offered by the strong: 1 Corinthians 12:22. God set the members in the body as it pleased Him, and the Spirit divides to every one severally as He will, so a seat by the door is an allocation and not a compromise.

Nobody in that hall is closer to God on the grounds of having heard more consecutive minutes of a talk. That is not how any of it works, and if it were, the measure of faith would be the volume of information a person absorbed while sitting still.

You have a hearing with God that does not run on a start time. The psalm says He compasses your path and your lying down and is acquainted with all your ways, Psalm 139:3, and a corridor is a way. The Holy Spirit does not begin when a service begins or stop at a fire door, and He has been keeping company with you in that corridor for a year and a half whether or not it felt like company.

And then the part that nobody puts on a poster. You are known by name in a corridor where nobody else was standing. There is a woman in Genesis, out in a desert nobody had followed her into, who gave God a name of her own making: Thou God seest me, Genesis 16:13. She was not in the tent where the promises were being discussed. She was outside it, alone, being seen, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a person who has been alone in a passageway with a toddler and a bag of raisins.