The Chapel With the Blue Window

The chapel was on the second floor between the elevators and the vending machines, and it had one window made of blue glass that was not a picture of anything, just blue, and it threw a rectangle of it on the floor in the afternoon.

She sat in there for about forty minutes on the worst day of her life, with a paper bracelet still on her wrist, and she did not cry until she was in the room, and then she did.

What she said, when she could say anything, she said in a whisper, because there was a man two rows in front and she did not want him to hear.

If You give me another one, I will raise him in Your house. I will have him there every week of his life. I promise You.

She had another one. He is six. He has never been inside a church.

Not once. Not for a christening, not for a carol service, not for anything. And the reason is not that she stopped believing, and it is not that she got busy, although she got busy. The reason is that she made a promise in a room with a blue window and she did not keep it, and now taking him through the door of a church would mean walking a six year old piece of evidence into the building.

So she does not.

You have a room like that. A chapel, a stairwell, the passenger seat of a parked car. You said something to God on a day when you had nothing left, and life gave you the thing you asked for, and then you found you could not do the part you said you would do. And the gift itself has become the reminder.

Let me name what is actually happening

I am going to go slowly here because this one is tender and there is no rushing it.

The thing she calls her failure is not what is keeping her out. What is keeping her out is a sentence she has never said out loud, and here it is: I bargained for a child, and I did not pay, and if I go anywhere near God with him now the debt comes with us.

Which turns her son into a receipt. That is the cruelty of it, and it is not hers, and I want to lift it off before we do anything else.

Come with me to Isaiah, to a passage about how the servant of God handles what is already damaged.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.Isaiah 42:3

You are held in a hand that does not do the ordinary thing with what is already bent. Isaiah 42:3 is written about a reed and a wick that have both nearly failed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been that hand since the afternoon in the chapel.

A reed and a wick

Both images are about things that have nearly failed already.

A bruised reed is a river reed that has been trodden or bent. It is finished as a reed. It will not make a pipe and it will not hold weight, and the ordinary thing to do with it is snap it and throw it in the water, because it costs nothing to replace and it has no use left.

The smoking flax is a lamp wick that has gone out and is still smoking. It has stopped giving light. The ordinary thing is to pinch it, because a smoking wick is only smell and mess.

And Isaiah says this is how you will know Him: He does not do the ordinary thing with either of them. He does not snap what is bent. He does not pinch out what has stopped giving light.

You are held right now in a hand that does not break what is already bent, and that is His whole character and not an exception He is making for you. Isaiah 42:3 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a prophecy and lays it across a woman in a front room six years later.

Read the end of it too, because it is easy to miss. He shall bring forth judgment unto truth. There is judgment in the verse. He does not pretend nothing happened. He simply does not do the judging by snapping the reed. That is the difference between a God who overlooks and a God who is gentle: the first one does not see, and the second one sees everything and is still gentle.

You have been seen entirely and handled gently at the same time, and there was never a version where one canceled the other. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is what judgment unto truth means alongside a reed that is not broken, and the Spirit of God has been the hand around that reed since the afternoon in the chapel.

He was never for sale

Now the harder thing, and I will say it plainly because saying it softly has never helped anybody.

The child was not something bought. You did not buy him with a promise in a chapel, which means you cannot owe for him, which means he is not evidence of anything.

I know what you said. I am not telling you that you did not say it, and I am not telling you it was nothing. You spoke to God on the worst day of your life and He heard you and He was not offended by a woman offering Him something in a blue room. That is what people do on those days. It was real, and it was never a transaction, because He does not run one.

You are the mother of a boy who was given and not sold. Scripture says every good gift comes down from the Father of lights with whom is no variableness, which is the opposite language to a bargain, and the Spirit of God has been with the two of you every one of the six years without once presenting a bill.

I am not going to take you through those years either. Not one of the Sundays. An inventory is a tribunal with the chairs moved around, and there is nothing like that here.