She was there for eleven years. She was on the rota for two different things. She could have told you where the spare kettle was kept.
Something happened. It does not matter for this page what it was, and I am not going to speculate, and she has told about three people the actual version. It was not a scandal and it was not a doctrinal crisis. It was the ordinary, entirely survivable, completely devastating experience of being handled badly by people she had trusted for a decade.
She did not storm out. That is what nobody understands about it. She went for a few more weeks, and then she missed one, and then she missed two, and then it was March and she had not been since January and nobody had rung.
That last part is the one that finished it.
Four years now.
And here is what has happened underneath, quietly, without a single decision being made about it.
She has stopped praying, mostly. Not from anger. It is more that praying feels like something a person in good standing does, and she has come to think of herself as somebody who used to be in good standing.
She reads sometimes, late, and feels like a trespasser.
At Christmas she stood outside a carol service for about four minutes and did not go in.
Because the arithmetic she has done, without ever writing it down, is this: I left the church, therefore I left God, therefore I am not one of His any more, and I am not sure there is a way back that does not involve walking into a building I cannot walk into.
That is you, and every step of that arithmetic is wrong.
Three things, at the top
I am not going to tell you to go back. Not to that one, not to any one, not this month. It is not the point of this page and making it the point would be exactly the pressure that has kept you outside a carol service in the cold.
I am not going to defend what happened. I do not know what it was, and the reflex where a Christian writer rushes to explain that the church is full of imperfect people is often a way of quietly moving the blame back onto the person who got hurt.
And I am not going to call you backslidden. That word gets used for a movement of the heart away from God, and you did not move your heart. You stopped attending a building after being hurt in it, and those are not the same event, however often they are treated as one.
You are not outside anything because of an address you no longer go to. Scripture says the Lord knoweth them that are his, 2 Timothy 2:19, and the knowing runs in His direction rather than depending on yours, and the Holy Spirit is not administering a register.
The psalm nobody can escape from
There is a passage in Psalm 139 written by a man testing the exits.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:7-10
He is not writing that as a threat and he is not writing it as a comfort exactly. He is checking, systematically, whether there is anywhere he could get to that God would not be.
Up. Down. The furthest edge of the known world.
And every one comes back the same: thou art there. Then the last line goes further than presence. Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. Not merely present in the far place. Actively holding somebody in it.
Now apply that to a woman who has not been in a church building for four years. If hell itself does not remove a person from His presence, a Sunday morning at home with a cup of tea has not managed it.
You are not somewhere God cannot reach. Scripture says even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me, Psalm 139:10, and the holding is described as continuing in the exact place a person felt furthest, and the Holy Spirit has been the one doing it for four years.
Nobody rang
Let me stay with that, because you have moved past it too quickly for four years and it is the actual wound. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Psalm 139:7-10, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.
Eleven years. Two rotas. And it took nobody two months to notice.
That is a real failure and it deserves to be named as one. It is not explained away by everybody being busy. A community that knew where you kept the spare kettle did not ring, and you found out something you did not want to know about what you had been part of.
And here is what that did, which is the thing worth seeing. It did not only end your attendance. It quietly rewrote your sense of your own value, because being unnoticed for two months by people you served for eleven years feels like information about you, and it is not. It is information about them, and about how institutions behave when somebody stops appearing in a slot.
God did not fail to ring. That is the distinction your four years have been missing. The silence was human, and you have been reading it as divine.
You are not forgotten by God because a rota forgot you. Scripture says can a woman forget her sucking child... yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee, Isaiah 49:15, and it concedes plainly that people do forget before it says He does not, and the Holy Spirit has not been silent for four years, whatever the phone did.
The trespasser feeling
You read late and feel like a trespasser. That is the detail that gives you away, and it is the most hopeful thing in your whole account.
A person who had genuinely walked away from God does not read at eleven at night. A person who has stopped caring does not stand outside a carol service for four minutes.
What you have is not absence of faith. It is faith with a disqualification notice attached to it that nobody ever actually issued. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Psalm 139:7-10, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.
And the notice came from a very ordinary place: you had learned, over eleven years, to associate being in good standing with being in the room. Every human institution teaches that, because that is how institutions work. Then you left the room and the standing came with it, because you had never had to separate the two before.
They were always separate.
You are not a trespasser in your own faith. Scripture says now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God, Ephesians 2:19, and citizenship is a status rather than an attendance record, and the Holy Spirit has never once treated you as somebody reading a book she is not entitled to.
I am not sending you back through a door, and I meant that.
What changes today is the arithmetic.
Leaving a church is not leaving God. It never was. That is a sentence you have never actually examined, and you have been living inside its conclusion for four years while never once testing its first line. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 139:7-10, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.
So pray tonight, badly, out of practice, in your kitchen. Not as a return and not as a repentance for a thing that was not a sin. Just talk, the way you did before you learned to associate it with a building.
And read whatever you were reading late at night, in the daylight, sitting up, as somebody entitled to it. It is written, in Psalm 139:7-10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.
If a day comes when you want to be around other people who believe things, that day will come and it will be yours, and it does not have to be that building or any building with a rota. It might be three people and a kitchen table. That counts. It has always counted.
You have never once been outside His hand, and no silence from anybody made it so. Scripture says whither shall I flee from thy presence, Psalm 139:7, and the answer that comes back from every direction is that there is nowhere, and the Holy Spirit has been holding you through four years in which you assumed He had let go.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own kitchen, at whatever volume you have. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the standing to speak was given to you and four years away from a building have not withdrawn it. Scripture carries every line here and the Holy Spirit brings them the distance. Nothing here sets God a date and nothing here obliges you to walk into any room; He answers in His own way and the outcome is His, and however He answers, none of it is a verdict on you.
- Assumption that walking out of a building was walking out on God, you are not true and you have had four years of me. The Word of God says there is nowhere I can flee from His presence, and in the name of Jesus I am not carrying a disqualification nobody ever issued.
- Feeling that I am a trespasser reading my own Bible at eleven at night, get out of this house. Scripture says ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God, Ephesians 2:19, and the Holy Spirit has never once treated me as somebody without the right to be here.
- Lord, Your right hand has been holding me in the exact place I assumed You had let go, and the silence four years ago was theirs and not Yours. I am praying in my kitchen tonight out of practice, and I am reading in the daylight sitting up.
Psalm 139:7-10
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