When Nobody Is Watching

Adaeze noticed it in the four minutes before the doors opened, which is a stretch of time she has been standing in on and off for about twenty years without ever once looking at it.

The chairs were out. The heaters had been on since six. Somebody had put the wrong lid on the urn and she had fixed it. There were four minutes before the first person came in, and Adaeze stood at the back of an empty hall.

And she thought: I do not know who I am in these four minutes.

That is not a dramatic thought and she did not treat it as one. She has been the one at the back of that hall since she was twenty-six. She leads two things and she runs a third. She has prayed with more people in that room than she could count. When somebody in that building has a bad month, she is the second call and often the first.

None of that is a performance. She wants that understood and so do I. It is real work and it has cost her real things and she has done it out of love.

But she has done all of it in front of people. Every single hour of it. And in the four minutes before the doors open, with nobody looking at all, she has never once known what she is supposed to be doing, and she has spent twenty years filling those four minutes with the urn.

What got her was a Wednesday. She was in her own kitchen at home, alone, in the middle of the afternoon, and she caught herself with her hands still, doing nothing, in silence, and her first reaction, before any other reaction, was a small jolt of something like guilt.

And then, out of nowhere, she remembered her father, who was not a religious man, who used to sit on the step outside their house in the evening with a cup and no radio and nothing in his hands. She remembered asking him once what he was doing.

And he said: nothing, my daughter. God is here and I am here. That is enough people for a step.

God is here and I am here. That is enough people for a step.

Adaeze stood in her own kitchen with her hands still and had to sit down, and she could not have explained it to a single person in that congregation.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting there, had nothing to do with the hall.

She thought: I have been real in front of people for twenty years, and I do not know whether I am real in a room with the door shut.

Say the word right, before anything else

I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman sitting down in her own kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a role, not a hall that fills up. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And let me say plainly what this article refuses to do. It will not predict anything. Nothing here is a warning that the ministry is going, and nothing here uses the fear of losing your place to make its point, because leaning on somebody's fear to teach them something true is a cheap way to do an honest job. The work is good. Keep doing it. If you are genuinely short, that is real and deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to look at the four minutes, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at them.

A room with the door shut

Jesus says one sentence about prayer that is really a sentence about where a person is actually alive, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to people at the back of halls ever since.

But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.Matthew 6:6

He is not against the public. He prayed in front of thousands. He is talking to people whose whole religious life had become a public performance, and He is not shaming them, He is offering them somewhere to be.

Go into your room. Shut the door. And then the thing that decides everything: your Father who is in secret.

Not who watches from outside the secret. Who is in it. The room with the door shut is not an empty room where you go to be alone with your own inadequacy. It is a room with Somebody already in it, and that is the whole difference between solitude and privacy.

You are not a hollow woman for the four minutes. You are somebody who has been genuinely useful in public for twenty years and has never once been told what the private half is for. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between knowing a verse about a closed door and being able to sit still behind one.

And here is what is already true of you this afternoon, before you change a thing about the rota. You are rich in the place that holds. His word says your Father is in the secret place, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a nice thought.

What the four minutes were showing you

Think about what got you at that kitchen table. It wasn't the guilt. You have had that jolt a thousand times.

It was your father on a step saying God is here and I am here, that is enough people for a step. It was a man who was not religious describing, exactly, in one sentence, the thing you have been trained out of. You were starving to hear that stillness is not emptiness, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as laziness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the four minutes. It was never that there is nothing there. It is that you have been checked on for twenty years and never once sat with, and a person who is only ever checked on eventually concludes that the private version of them has no content.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. There is somebody in that room and there always has been. Jesus went out to a hillside and stayed all night with nobody there to see it, which means the most important hours of the most important life ever lived had no audience at all, and He was at your kitchen table before you sat down.