Behind The Camera For Five Years

The desk is at the back on the left, behind a low partition that somebody built out of plywood in a weekend and painted the wrong shade, and everybody has stopped noticing.

Two monitors. A small mixer. A laptop that has to be restarted in a particular order or the audio comes through on one side, which is a thing only he knows and which he has written on a card and taped down, and which he still ends up doing himself most weeks.

Five years he has run the stream.

He is genuinely needed. There are perhaps forty people watching every week who cannot get there. One of them is a woman in her nineties who used to be in the choir. Another is a man who has been at home for two years and who emails him occasionally to say thank you, which he has never mentioned to anybody.

He is also the only person in that building who knows the system, which is a sentence that starts out sounding like an achievement and turns into something else over five years.

And this morning, during the last song, he did the arithmetic he has been avoiding.

Two hundred and sixty Sundays. Every one of them watched through a monitor while making sure the shot was right.

He has been in church every week for five years and he has not been at church in five years, and those two sentences are both true and he cannot work out how to say the second one to anybody without it landing as an accusation against people who have never done anything but be glad he is there.

Where this does not go

Let me be clear before anything else, because you spend your life watching what is coming next in a frame.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you to hand it over, train somebody, cut back, or say a word to anybody. Not today and not by implication at the end. Nobody here can see your church or that desk or whether there is anybody else who could learn it, and a page that cannot see those things has no business steering you.

And it is not going to tell you what you should be doing instead. There is no list at the bottom and there is no exercise coming.

You are not being aimed at an exit, and there is nothing about this you have to settle today. That is not me being careful with you. Scripture is what makes room for the true thing before any decision, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to have a plan before He would sit down at the back with him.

The invitation is to pour it out

Here is the sentence I want on that desk, and it is a short one in a psalm about waiting.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out your heart. Not present a case. Not raise a concern. Not bring a balanced summary with the gratitude at the front so it comes out acceptable.

Pour out is what you do with a container. It means everything comes, in whatever order it happens to be in, and the point is not that it is well argued, the point is that it is out.

And notice the audience: before Him. Not to the person who oversees you, not in a meeting, not to the forty people watching. Before Him, which is the one audience where nothing you say can cost anybody anything.

You are invited to empty the whole thing out in front of God with no order and no argument in it, and Scripture puts that instruction in the imperative. I am not stretching the psalm. Psalm 62:8 says pour out, plainly, as a command to a whole people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and gives a man behind a partition somewhere to put five years.

Nobody did this to you

Now the reason it has never been said, which is worth naming.

There is no villain. That is the whole problem. Nobody built that desk to keep you away from anything. The plywood partition was a kindness. The person who asked you five years ago thought they were giving you something you would enjoy, and for the first year or so they were right.

And a man cannot make a complaint that has no one to complain about, so he does not make it at all, and it sits in him and accumulates one Sunday at a time.

Two hundred and sixty is a large number. You had never added it up before this morning and that is not an accident. Some things stay bearable precisely by never being counted.

You have not been ungrateful for five years, you have been accumulating something at the rate of one Sunday a week and never once totaling it. The word invites the pouring out without requiring a defendant, and the Spirit who searches all things has been behind that partition every Sunday for five years.

The cost is not the Sundays

And here is the deeper thing, which is not about the stream.

For a long time there has been a real, weekly, entirely describable fact about your life that has never been said out loud to God. Not out of coldness, and not out of pride. Because you could not find a way to say it that did not sound like an accusation against good people, and a man does not bring God a sentence that would injure somebody if it got out.

So it has been carried instead of poured out, and that is a different arrangement and it is heavier by a long way.

He has known since the second year.

You are welcome to pour out the sentence that would sound like an accusation anywhere else, and He has never once asked you to pretend a monitor is the same as a room. The word says pour out your heart before Him and calls Him a refuge in the same breath, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not standing at the desk waiting for a better arrangement of it.