I Sit With The Same Woman Every Week

Thursday, two o'clock, the same chair by the window on the second floor.

She takes the long way round from the parking area because there is a corridor where the light is good and she likes that thirty seconds.

An hour. Sometimes an hour and ten if the tea comes late.

They have had, by her own estimate, the same four conversations for about two years now. The one about the sister. The one about the house on the hill and the ice in the winter. The one about a coat that got lost in 1961 which is, genuinely, the funniest story she has ever been told, and which she has heard perhaps ninety times, and which she has never once let show.

And the fourth one, which is not really a conversation, which is the one where the older woman says something about being frightened, and it is different every time, and it is over in about forty seconds, and then they go back to the sister.

Six years of Thursdays. Call it two hundred and eighty visits.

Nobody organized this. It is not on a schedule. Nobody at church knows it happens, because it started informally and there was never a natural moment to mention it and now it would be strange to bring up.

And here is the plain fact she is entirely clear about.

If she stopped, there would be no gap anywhere. No list would have a hole in it. Nobody would ask. The older woman would sit in that chair on a Thursday and after some weeks would stop expecting anybody, and that is the whole of it.

Before anything else

Let me say what is not coming, because you have your coat on and I would rather be straight with you.

Nothing here is going to promise you that somebody will find out. I do not know that. This may go entirely unrecorded for another six years and neither of us would be surprised.

And nothing here is going to hold you up as an example to anybody. There is no paragraph coming where the quiet visitors are set in front of the people who do the visible things.

And nothing here is going to tell you that this outranks anything. It does not, and you have no interest in that.

You are not being consoled here, and nothing on this page asks you to be pleased about going unrecorded. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one sentence of Jesus about who is actually in a room, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman reconciled to being filler before He would speak to her.

He says who was in the chair

Here is the sentence, and it lands at the end of a scene where a great many people are extremely surprised.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Matthew 25:40

The whole force of that scene is the astonishment. Nobody in it knew. The people being commended say, in effect, when did we see you.

They are not being modest. They genuinely did not know. Whatever they did, they did it thinking it was an ordinary thing done to an ordinary person, and the whole point of the passage is that they were wrong about who was in the room.

And notice what the acts are. Food, water, clothes, a visit. He names visiting specifically, twice.

You have been in a room every Thursday for six years with somebody other than the person you thought was in the chair, and He says that in the plainest possible terms. I am not stretching that. Matthew 25:40 says done it unto me without qualification, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman walking a corridor because the light is good.

Ye have done it, and the tense matters

Now the grammar, because it is doing something.

Ye have done it. Perfect tense. Completed. Not will be counted as, not will be treated as if. Have done.

He is not saying it is like visiting Him. He is saying that is what the visit was.

Which means the ninetieth telling of the story about the coat in 1961 was an actual event with an actual recipient, and so was the forty seconds about being frightened, and so was the tea when it came late.

Two hundred and eighty times.

You have already done a thing two hundred and eighty times that Scripture describes in the completed tense, and no record anywhere on earth is required for that to be so. That is Matthew 25:40 in its own grammar, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that room by the window every Thursday at two.

And the forty seconds

One more thing, and it is the specific one.

There is a moment, most weeks, when she says something about being frightened. Forty seconds. Different every time. And then you both go back to the sister.

You have never told anybody about those forty seconds, partly because it would be a breach and partly because there is nothing to tell. Nothing happens in them. You do not fix anything. She says it and you are there and then it passes.

That is the part of six years that has no evidence at all.

You have been present for something nobody will ever know occurred, and the word says God sees in secret without a hint that a witness would have improved it. Matthew 6:4 says exactly that, and the Spirit who bears witness has been in those forty seconds every single week.