Nothing In Here Moves But Me

Ten past five, and the fourth floor comes on one section at a time.

She rolls the trolley out of the lift and the lights find her as she goes, panel by panel. Dark ahead of her, dark closing again behind her, and one warm square of morning moving down the middle of the floor with her standing inside it.

Bins first. Then the glass room at the end, where somebody's meeting left seven cups and a plate around the long table, and the rings have dried onto the wood overnight.

She wipes the table. She wipes it every night and every morning it is covered again, and she stopped resenting that a long time ago. It is the job. Somebody has to make the room fit to sit in before the people who sit in it arrive.

And because there is not another soul in the building, she prays out loud while she works. Full voice. No hush, no eyes closed, no hands folded, because there is nobody on the fourth floor at ten past five to hear a woman ask God for the same thing she asked Him for last night, and the night before that.

Four years, this month. She knows the month exactly, because it was the month her hours changed and the sum stopped working, and it has not worked since.

She finishes the glass room and stands in the doorway of it for a moment with the cloth still in her hand. The chairs are square to the table. The blinds have not shifted. The letter she left face down on her own kitchen table has not moved either, and neither has the figure at the bottom of it.

The lights come on for her and go out behind her, and the whole floor at six is exactly as still as it was at five.

Nothing in here moves but me, she thinks.

You have stood in your own version of that room and thought your own version of that sentence. So let us pick it up carefully, the two of us, because there is far more inside it than anybody has told you.

First, the ground under your feet

Let me clear it before we stand on it, because nobody can stand on ground they are unsure of.

Faith over poverty does not mean faith removes poverty.

It has never meant that. Nowhere in Scripture is there an arrangement where believing converts into an amount, and whoever suggested otherwise was not reading it to you out of the book. If that idea has been sitting at the back of your mind for four years quietly explaining your account to you, it can go, and it can go this morning.

Because notice what it was actually doing while it sat there. It was not doing arithmetic. It was building a case, slowly and patiently, against you. A real believer would not still be in this. There is a key and it was handed to other people. Something in me is the reason nothing moves.

That case is closed and you are not the defendant. God knows what things you have need of before you ask Him (Matthew 6:8), which means the shortfall has never once been news in heaven and was never a report card on your trust, and the Holy Spirit who carries your praying when the words run out (Romans 8:26) is not standing at the back of the fourth floor with a clipboard.

Pressed on every side, and then a comma

Now the other half, and it matters just as much, because a correction that swings too far leaves a person thinking faith does nothing at all.

There is a man in the New Testament who wrote four short pairs about a life shaped very like yours.

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.2 Corinthians 4:8 and 9

Read what he does not do there. He does not say the pressure lifted. He does not say the trouble ended, or that the perplexity was explained to him, or that somebody finally gave him a reason. Every one of those four lines still has the pressure standing in it when it reaches the full stop.

What he puts in is a comma.

Pressed, comma, not crushed. That comma is the whole of it, and it has done more for more believers than any promise of relief ever did, because it is the only shape of words that tells the truth about a life like this one.

So look where the comma sits in yours. Four years of trouble on every side, and you prayed on the way in this morning. That is the comma. You are not crushed, and the written word calls that being kept by the power of God (1 Peter 1:5) rather than being good at coping, and it is the Spirit of God doing the keeping while you push a trolley.

The trouble is real. The comma is real. You have both of them at once, and the second one is no consolation prize for the first: it is evidence of something alive in you that four years of pressure has not been able to reach.

What your faith is doing at ten past five

Not paying the letter. Let us have that said plainly, and then let us look properly at what it is doing, because it has been undervalued on that floor for a long time.

Your faith is why you prayed out loud instead of going quiet. Four years is long enough for a person to stop, and stopping would honestly be the simpler position from where you are standing. You did not stop. That is not a small thing and it is not a neutral thing, and Scripture has a word for exactly it, which is enduring (James 1:12).

Your faith is why you wiped the table properly. Faith comes out through the hands long before it comes out through the mouth, and a woman doing an unseen job well in an empty building is not merely getting through a shift. You are doing it as to the Lord, and Colossians 3:23 says so in as many words, and the Holy Spirit who lives in you was in that glass room the whole time you were.

Your faith is why the case against you never quite managed to shut the door on God. Tired, unimpressed, four years in, and still talking to Him out loud where nobody can hear. That is faith standing up in an empty room, and nobody who has never done this arithmetic gets to call it weak.

And nobody, myself included, gets to tell you it is about to be converted into a figure. That is a promise no one on this page was authorized to make, and I would far rather leave you holding the truth than holding a nice ending.