First Light With Shovels

The fire was Tuesday night. It is Thursday, and Nadine leaves her house at twenty past five in the morning because she has not been sleeping and there is no point pretending about it.

She is not going out there to do anything. She is going out because she wants twenty minutes alone with it before anybody else has to see her face. That is the plan, and she has been honest with herself about the plan, which is more than she has managed about most things this week.

She has been at that church for thirty-one years. She has also, for about four of those years, been very quietly done with it. There was a thing that happened. It does not need retelling here and she would not thank me for retelling it. She stayed, the way people stay, and she stopped expecting anything, and she had made a private peace with the idea that this was simply what it was going to be.

She turns off the county road at five forty.

There are trucks in the lot.

Not one. Nine or ten, parked any way at all, and headlights on because it is still dark, and a folding table already up by the fence with two thermoses and a stack of styrofoam cups. There are shovels laid out on the grass in a row like tools at a barn sale. There are wheelbarrows. Somebody has brought a case of work gloves still in the plastic.

And there are people. She counts them because she cannot make herself do anything else. Nineteen. Nineteen people, at ten to six in the morning, on a Thursday.

She recognizes maybe eleven of them.

A man she has never seen in her life hands her a pair of gloves, size medium, and says they were out of large.

That is your morning too.

You have watched the church fail. Maybe from the inside, maybe from a distance, maybe in a way that has a name and a date you do not say out loud. And the conclusion arrived so quietly you may never have noticed making it: that when a house burns like that, whatever was living in it left first.

You are held by a faithfulness that is not the church's and never depended on it. Scripture says His mercies have not been exhausted and it says so from inside a ruin, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a thing a person can stand on in a parking lot at ten to six.

Notice where this verse is standing when it says that

Lamentations is a book of funeral poetry written over a destroyed city and a burned temple. It is not written at a distance. The man writing it is in the ash.

He spends most of chapter three cataloguing exactly how bad it is, and he does not soften any of it. And then, in the middle of the worst of it, he says this.

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; His mercies never come to an end.Lamentations 3:22

That sentence is not a person who has avoided the fire saying something nice about God. It is a man sitting in the actual wreckage of the actual house of God saying that the covenant faithfulness is still running.

And the subject of the whole book is corporate. He is not lamenting a private disappointment. He is lamenting a people, and the mercy he names is mercy toward that people.

You are inside a company God has not stopped keeping covenant with, and the keeping is His side of it. That is written in the middle of a lament over a burned temple, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence from inside the ash and makes it hold weight in somebody else's ash centuries later.

I want to say the corporate part plainly, because this is the category where the shrinking does the most damage. When Scripture calls the church the bride of Christ, it means a whole people. A body. A house made of many stones. It is not a private romance between Christ and a reader, and it never has been. Which means the question in front of you is not whether Christ is disappointed in you personally. It is whether He has walked out on a company. And that is a question Scripture answers about Him, not about us.

The honesty is not the enemy here

Let me be plain about something, because a softer version of this article would be useless to you.

The church has done real harm. Not in the abstract. Specifically, and to people, and sometimes to you. I am not going to explain that away, and I am not going to hand you a reason it was secretly fine. It was not fine.

I am also not going to name a tradition and hand you somebody to be angry at, because that is the cheapest possible use of your morning and it would not do you any good.

Here is why the honesty belongs here at all. A covenant kept on one side only is not a smaller thing than a covenant kept on both. It is a larger one. Scripture is completely unembarrassed about the failure of God's people, page after page, and it puts that failure right next to His faithfulness on purpose, because the second one is only visible against the first.

You have a Christ who has not left His church, and He is not leaving. His word says that if we are faithless, He remains faithful, because He cannot deny Himself, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in a company that has plainly not deserved Him and is still His.

What nineteen people at ten to six actually proves

Nadine did not organize that. Nobody phoned her. She was not on a list.

Something moved through a town in the dark between Tuesday night and Thursday morning, and it moved through people who had no obligation, some of whom had never been inside that building, and it put them in a parking lot with shovels before the sun came up.

That is not the church being impressive. Eleven of those nineteen would tell you something rueful about themselves if you gave them ten minutes and a cup of that coffee. It is something else working through very ordinary people who came anyway.

You were not left, and the proof of it does not have to come from the people who hurt you. Scripture says His compassions have not been exhausted and that they are new every morning, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves through a town at four in the morning and gets nineteen ordinary people out of bed.