Loved at This Temperature

Eight people have just gone out of the front room and the coats have taken twenty minutes to leave, the way they always do. There are nine cups on the tray and one of them has been used as a saucer for a teabag. Somebody has left a cardigan over the arm of the chair, which means somebody will be back tomorrow.

Half an hour ago a girl of about twenty prayed out loud, near the end, and her voice went. She could not finish the sentence. The whole room went still and warm around her the way a room does, and one of the older women put a hand on her back, and it was lovely, and everybody said so afterwards in the hall while they hunted for car keys.

The woman whose front room it is stood by the door with the teapot in her hand, and felt nothing at all. Not annoyance. Not envy. Nothing. She watched the girl cry and she thought, with a kind of clinical fairness, that is exactly how I was at nineteen, on the back field at camp with my hands up and my face wet, and I would give both arms to be her again. Then the kettle clicked and she went to fill it.

You have stood in that doorway. Maybe not with a teapot, maybe it was a car park or a kitchen or the third row, but you have watched somebody feel something you used to feel, and done the sum, and come out short. And here is the part nobody says out loud: you are not even sad about it any more. You have simply come to a settled private verdict that the best of you happened a long time ago, and you have been quietly serving out the rest.

What nineteen actually was

Let me sit in the low place with you a minute, because I am not going to rush past it. There is a particular loneliness in being the person who makes the tea while somebody else meets God in your own living room. It does not make you bitter. It makes you efficient. You get very good at hosting the thing you cannot seem to enter, and you would rather chew glass than say so out loud to anybody, because it sounds like ingratitude and it is not ingratitude, it is grief.

And there is a photograph, isn't there. Actual or remembered. A girl on a field with her hands up. And somewhere along the way she stopped being a memory and became a standard.

So let us take the measurement apart, because it is built on a sentence that runs the wrong way round. Here is the sentence the right way round, from John, who was old when he wrote it and had watched a great many people cool off and warm up again.

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.1 John 4:10

Read where the love starts. Not in the field. Not in the crying. Not in her. You are loved by God at the temperature you are sitting at right now, and that is not my encouragement, that is what is written, and it was His Spirit who moved a tired old apostle to put the sentence in that exact order so nobody could get it backwards.

Where the fire was lit

Follow it a few verses on and John says the same thing with the tap turned all the way open: we love because he first loved us. First. Before the camp. Before the good years and the thin years. Before that girl on the field ever had a feeling worth remembering, God had already decided about her, and the deciding was never a response to her performance in worship.

Which means the fire at nineteen was not something she generated and then lost. It was a warmth she was standing near. The heat was never hers. It came off Him, and He is still exactly where He was, and He has not moved one inch further from you than He was that night on the field. You have the same God at the same distance, and the same Spirit who lit it is the one tending it now, because Scripture says He is the keeper of what He starts, not the auditor of how it feels this week.

And He is unhurried with a low flame in a way that would surprise you. Isaiah says of Him that a bruised reed He will not break and a faintly burning wick He will not snuff out. Read that slowly. Not He will fan it into a blaze on demand. Not He will replace it with a better one. He will not snuff it out. That is a promise about God's patience with a smoking wick, and it was written down long before anybody thought to grade a believer by how much they felt on a Tuesday.

So hear this plainly, because a great many faithful people never do. You are not a cooled version of a better Christian. You are a person God is loving today, in a front room with the cups still out, and the love is not weaker for arriving in a quiet season. Christ is in you and you are in Him, and the Holy Spirit who sealed that is not comparing this year's you with any other year's you. He never once did.

One honest thing before we go on, and I will say it once. If the flatness has stopped being flatness and started telling you the house would be lighter without you in it, that is not a spiritual temperature and it is not for sitting alone with. Tell a real human being today: your doctor, a pastor, a friend who will come and sit down. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local emergency number or crisis line. Prayer and a phone call have never been rivals, and I would say the same to my own brother.