He Went Out While It Was Still Dark

He has done the hard part twice now and both times he ended up standing in his own hallway.

The first time he freed up the space, he stood in the kitchen. His brother-in-law was in the kitchen. The second time he went to the bedroom and his nephew was asleep in it, because his nephew sleeps in it, because there are nine people in a house built for five and everybody knows the arrangement and nobody complains about it out loud.

So he stood in the hallway for a while with his hands in his pockets.

Every single thing he has ever read about this assumes a room. Find a quiet place. Get alone with God. Shut the door. The door in his house has not been shut on one person by another person in three years and it would be an event if it were.

And what he has concluded, slowly, without ever putting it in words, is that this is for people with more space than he has. Which he does not resent. He is not a resentful man. He just quietly filed the whole subject under things that are for other people, along with several other things.

If you have got the time and nowhere to put it, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to tell you to find a quiet room.

Jesus had the same problem and Mark tells you exactly what He did

Here is a sentence people quote all the time and almost never read carefully, and reading it carefully is worth more to a man in a hallway than anything else in this article.

And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.Mark 1:35

Now count the verbs. Rising up. Went out. Departed. And there prayed.

Three of those four are travel. He got up, He left the house, He went somewhere else, and then He prayed. The praying is the fourth thing, and it happens in a place He had to go and find.

That is not a man with a study. Look at where He was: staying in somebody else's house, in a small town, with a crowd around the door that had been there since the previous evening. Peter's mother-in-law was in that house. The whole town was at the door. There was no quiet room in that building and there was never going to be one.

So He went out. The solitary place was not a room He owned. It was a place He walked to, in the dark, because there was not one in the house.

You are not disqualified by your living arrangements, and you were never actually asked to have a spare room. Mark 1:35 is where that sits, in four verbs that are mostly walking, and the same Spirit who moved Mark to record the going out is the one who takes a quiet shame off a man standing in a hallway.

A place, not a room

Now let me take the word solitary apart a bit, because it has picked up furniture in our imaginations that is not in the text.

A solitary place is not a nice place. It is not comfortable, it is not private in the way we mean private, and it is certainly not decorated. The word is closer to deserted. An empty stretch. Somewhere nobody happens to be.

That is available to almost everybody, and it is almost never indoors.

It is a bench at the far end of the lot before the shift starts. It is the last section of the walk home if you go the long way. It is sitting in the car after you have parked and before you go in, which is where an enormous number of people in this country meet God and almost none of them would call it a solitary place because it does not look like the pictures.

And notice what your hallway problem actually is. It is not that you have no time. You have made the time twice. It is that you have been looking for the wrong kind of place, in the wrong building, on the strength of a description nobody in the Gospels ever gave.

You have somewhere available to you already, and it is already enough, and it does not need a door on it. He promised it, in the sentence about the Father who is in secret and who sees in secret (Matthew 6:6), where the secret is about who is watching and never about the square footage, and His Spirit does not require an empty building.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before anything else, this outranks all of it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one.

And everything in this article works exactly the same for a man eating three meals a day. The time we are talking about is any time you can free, however you free it. If freeing it involves your body at all, that is between you and your doctor and it is not the subject here.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in that house is right and in a house of nine it is basic good manners. None of it fails anything.

You are fully included in this, and you were never on the edge of it because of what your body needs. It is written into 2 Corinthians 8:12, where God receives according to what a person has, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a man who has been quietly filing himself under other people.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.