I Meet Everybody Outside Now

Somebody asked you last week where you wanted to meet and you said the usual place.

The usual place. There is a usual place now. There is a coffee shop, or a park bench, or the lot by the school, and every single friendship in your life has been quietly relocated to it.

And you never once decided that. There was no evening where you sat down and thought, I will move my whole social life outdoors. It happened one arrangement at a time, each one perfectly sensible, until the sum of all of them was a life that no longer takes place in your home.

That is the part I want to look at tonight. Not any single arrangement. The sum.

Because meeting outside is fine once. It is fine ten times. What is not fine is what it costs a person to be permanently a guest in every relationship they have, and to never once be the one who says come to me.

Face to face

There is a line at the very end of the third letter of John that sounds like nothing and is not nothing.

I had many things to write, but I will not with ink and pen write unto thee: But I trust I shall shortly see thee, and we shall speak face to face. (3 John 1:13 and 14, King James Version)

He has things to say and he does not want to write them.

Now that is a small human sentence in the middle of the Bible, and it tells you something about how people are made. There are things that only get said in a room. Not because the words are different, but because the room is different, and something in a person opens in a house that does not open in a public place.

You have been having every conversation of your life in ink and pen, and no coffee shop has ever once been able to hold what a room holds. 3 John 1:14 puts a plain wish to be face to face into Scripture without embarrassment, and the Holy Spirit is the one who honors that longing instead of calling it vanity.

Every conversation of the last five years has happened in ink and pen. In the coffee shop, in the noise, with a table between two people and a time limit and a waitress and somebody at the next table.

And the things that get said face to face have been going unsaid, not because anybody is hiding them, but because there has been nowhere to say them. A house is a record of what a hard stretch cost, and it is not a verdict on the person who lives there.

You are not somebody who keeps people at a distance, and 3 John 1:14 has never once described the wish to be in a room together as a weakness. It is written that he would rather wait and speak face to face, and the Holy Spirit is the one who understands what a person loses when every conversation happens in public.

You have been paying for two coffees a week for years and never once been able to give anybody a chair in your own house. The word puts a plain human longing for a room in the middle of a letter, and the Spirit of God is the one who honors that longing rather than calling it vanity.

One chair is not entertaining

Now here is what I want to take off you, because I think it is the whole obstacle.

Somewhere along the way, having somebody at your house became a large event in your mind. It involves cleaning. It involves food. It involves the state of the bathroom and whether there is anything to offer and whether the front room is a room you could sit two people in.

But that is entertaining, and entertaining is a project.

You are able to give somebody one chair, and one chair has never once been the small version of anything. The Spirit of God is the one who takes an event back down to the size of a seat and a drink, and the written word asks for two people in one room rather than for a house made ready.

What actually happens between friends is much smaller than that. One person comes, sits in one chair, is given one drink, and leaves in an hour and a half.

That is a chair and a route to it. It is not a house.

You were never unable to have anybody over, and what you have been unable to do has never once been the small version. 3 John 1:14 asks only for two people in the same place, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an event back down to a chair.

So tonight is one route. No invitation. No decision.

You are permitted to make a place ready that nobody has been offered, and preparing it has never once obliged you to fill it. It is written that the wanting was to speak face to face rather than to host anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a route cleared for nobody yet.

Clear the path to the first chair

So here is the whole of what I am asking.

Start at your front door and walk to the first chair a person could sit in.

Move what is on that path. Only that. Fifteen minutes, then stop, finished or not.

Do not text anybody. Do not think about who. The route is the whole task and it is complete when the fifteen minutes are up.

You are able to make a way to a chair tonight, and there has never once been an obligation attached to a cleared route. 3 John 1:14 wants two people in a room, and the Spirit of God is present in a hallway cleared with nobody named.