Twenty Minutes in a Bus Shelter

The roof of that shelter is the ridged plastic kind and rain on it is one of the loudest small sounds there is, and the water comes off the front edge in a line rather than in drops, which is a design fault everybody has learned to stand behind.

Twenty minutes. The display says so, and the display is usually about right, and there is nothing whatever to be done with twenty minutes in a bus shelter in the rain.

There is a bench with a gap in the middle of it where a slat has gone. There is a timetable behind scratched plastic. There is somebody's dropped glove on the pavement outside that has been there for two days and that everybody looks at and nobody picks up.

She used to pray in gaps like this.

That is the plain fact of it. Bus stops, queues, the four minutes waiting for a kettle. It was not a discipline and she would have been embarrassed to call it prayer; it was more like the way you talk to somebody who is in the room with you, in fragments, about nothing much.

It stopped about three years ago.

Not because she fell out with God. Because somewhere in there she picked up an idea, and the idea is that you need a reason to come. Something to bring. A matter to raise. And the only matter she has, the one that sits behind everything, belongs to what another person did, and she is not going to raise it, and so she stands in a bus shelter for twenty minutes and says nothing.

Let me say who I am speaking to. Today I am speaking to you, the one carrying what somebody else did. I will not ask you what it was, and nothing here wants the thing itself.

And before you brace: naming it is not a condition of anything here, and not naming it is not avoidance, and I will not let anybody tell you otherwise.

Read whose name is on the pass

There is a sentence in Hebrews written to people who knew exactly how restricted access to God had been, and the whole force of it is in one short phrase at the end.

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus.Hebrews 10:19

The holiest. The innermost room. One man, one day a year, and he did not walk in on the strength of his character, and everybody in the room hearing that letter knew the arrangements in detail.

Boldness to enter. The word is that civic word again, the standing to go in and to speak.

And then the clause that settles the whole matter of what you need to bring.

By the blood of Jesus.

That is the entry document. Not a reason. Not a matter to raise. Not a well formed request or a legitimate agenda item. The thing that gets a person into the innermost room is named in that verse, and it is not anything the person is carrying.

You have entry by the blood of Jesus, and you were never the one who had to supply the grounds. I am not offering you a generous reading. The written word names the means of access explicitly and names it as His, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a woman standing behind a line of water off a plastic roof.

Nobody at that door asks for an agenda

Now let me deal with the idea itself, because I think somebody handed it to you and I do not think you built it yourself.

There is a way of teaching prayer that turns it into a meeting. You come with items. You have a structure. And there is nothing wrong with structure, and some people are helped enormously by it, and it has been a disaster for you, because a meeting requires an agenda and yours has one item on it that you are never going to table.

But the verse does not describe a meeting. It describes a room and a way in.

A person with the right of entry does not need a reason to be inside. They need the right of entry, and they have it, and once they are in they may say anything at all or nothing at all, and their standing in the room does not change either way.

You are inside on a standing that does not require an agenda, and you were never going to be asked at the door what you had come about. Scripture puts the access in the blood and nowhere else, and it is His Spirit, not a well prepared reason, who makes a woman able to speak in a room she is already standing in.