The Fish Tank in the Waiting Room

There are eleven fish and she has counted them four times, which is how she knows there are eleven, and that two of them are almost certainly the same fish making a circuit.

It is a small room. Three chairs along one wall and four along the other, a laminated notice about eyesight standards, a clock that is two minutes fast and has been for as long as anybody has been coming here, and the tank, which hums. There is a young lad opposite in a football shirt jiggling one knee at about a hundred and forty beats a minute. There is a woman by the door reading the eyesight notice for the third time. Nobody speaks. Nobody ever speaks in these rooms. Everybody in here is waiting to be told one of exactly two things about themselves, and the waiting has its own weather.

She is forty-six and this is her third attempt and she is going to pass today, and she does not know that yet, and in about ninety minutes she will sit in this same room while a man with a clipboard tells her so, and she will cry a bit in the car and then ring her sister.

But that is later. Right now she is looking at a fish tank, and the reason she is looking at a fish tank rather than at the lad or the woman or the man behind the desk is not nerves about the test.

It is that she has been in a waiting room for eleven years. Not this one. And if that sentence landed somewhere in you, then come and sit down, because I want to be careful about who I am speaking to. Not, today, the one carrying something another person did to them; that has its own message on this site and it is written for you and it uses different words. Today I am speaking to the one who did something, and brought it to God, and was answered, and is somehow still sitting in the chair by the door with her eyes on the fish.

The result came back a long time ago

Two different injuries walk into a life together and nobody separates them for you, so here is the separation, and it is the whole of this message.

Guilt says: I did something wrong. Shame says: I am something wrong.

Guilt is about an act and it has a remedy, and the remedy is confession, and you used it, and it worked. That account closed. You would say so out loud in front of anybody.

Shame is not a verdict about an act at all. It is a verdict about a person, and that is precisely why every honest hour you have spent going back over the act has changed nothing. You were answering a charge that was never filed. And somewhere in year four or year seven you began to suspect that the reason nothing shifted was you, and I want to say clearly, before another line of this: it was not. Nobody had told you there were two wounds. That is on the people who teach, and I am one of them.

You are cleared, and you have been cleared since the hour you asked, and the result is not pending. That is not my encouragement to you. It is written that if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the strength of my sentence, who carries a finished verdict down into a body that has been braced for eleven years.

Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall walk, O LORD, in the light of thy countenance.Psalm 89:15

Look at what that verse thinks is normal.

Not: they shall be permitted to approach the light. Not: they shall be granted a glimpse of it if they hold still. They shall walk in it. The light of His face is the weather they live in. It is the ordinary condition of a person who has heard the joyful sound, and the joyful sound is not a feeling, it is an announcement: the trumpet that told a whole nation the debt years were over and everybody was going home.

Which means this. You are walking in the light of His face right now, at forty-six, in a room with a fish tank, and you did not have to earn the weather. That is what Scripture calls the ordinary life of the forgiven, and His Spirit is the one who makes a settled fact feel like something you can stand up in.

Nobody is going to come and tell you again

Here is why the waiting is so convincing. In a waiting room, someone eventually comes and tells you. That is what the room is for.

But that is not the shape of what happened to you. Nobody is coming with a clipboard. The telling already happened, at a cross, in public, in front of witnesses, and it was not provisional. What you have been calling waiting is a habit of not looking, and I say that without one ounce of blame in it, because a habit of eleven years is not a moral failure. It is a groove.

Grooves get worn by repetition and they get filled the same way. So the ask at the end of this message is not enormous. It is one look.

You have His countenance turned toward you, and you have it now, unearned and unreviewed. The word says He makes His face to shine upon us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page in a Bible and puts it on a person's actual face in an actual room.