Surely The Lord Is In This Place

He has a plan and the plan has been three years away for about seven years.

The plan is: when the youngest is at school properly, and when the shifts settle, and when they have moved, because the current place has no room in it anywhere and everybody knows it. Then. Then he will have somewhere.

He is quite specific about it. There would be a chair. Early, before anybody else. Half an hour, maybe, and quiet, and that is when the thing he has been intending since he was twenty-six would finally start.

And in the meantime, which is now seven years long, there is a house with five people in it and a television that is on more than it is off and a dog and a nightshift and a mother-in-law who arrives without warning.

And what he does in that house, spiritually speaking, is wait.

Not badly. He is not bitter and he does not resent his family. He simply has a category in his head called when things are quieter, and everything he actually wants with God has been filed in it, and the file has been getting slowly fuller since he was in his twenties.

If you have got a file like that, come and sit down. Nothing here is waiting for anything.

He said it about the worst place he had ever slept

Here is a sentence that everybody has heard on a wall plaque and almost nobody has read in its actual circumstances.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16

Look at where he is when he says it.

He is running away from a brother who has said he will kill him. He is somewhere between two places, in open country, with no shelter. He has a stone under his head, which the text mentions specifically, and if a writer bothers to tell you a man used a rock as a pillow he is not describing comfort.

That is not a retreat center. It is not a quiet room in a house he has finally got round to organizing. It is the worst night of a frightened man's life in a location with nothing to recommend it at all.

And that is where he says it, and notice what he says: Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.

The discovery is not that God arrived. Nothing changed about the field. What changed is that Jacob found out God had been there the whole time and he had not known.

You are in a place God is already in, and He was already in it before you noticed. Genesis 28:16 is where that sits, said by a man on the ground with a rock under his head, and the same Spirit who moved somebody to record the stone is the one who reaches a man who has been waiting for a chair since he was twenty-six.

The conditions were never the door

Now let me be careful, because the plan is not wrong and I am not going to mock it.

A chair would be good. Half an hour before anybody is up is genuinely a fine thing and people who have it should have it, and if the shifts settle and the house happens, he should absolutely take it.

The problem is not that he wants conditions. It is that he has made them a threshold, and a threshold has a way of moving. It was three years away when the eldest was small and it is three years away now, and it will be three years away when the youngest leaves, because there will be something then too, and there always is.

And underneath that there is a quieter belief which he has never inspected, which is that the thing he wants with God requires an environment God has not so far provided. Which is a strange thing to believe about God, said out loud, and it has been running in him unexamined for seven years.

Jacob had no conditions whatsoever. That is what makes the verse useful rather than merely encouraging. He had a field, a rock, a brother behind him with a grievance, and no expectation of anything at all, and it turned out to be the gate of heaven.

You have not been kept waiting by God, and He was never withholding the conditions. He promised it, in the sentence about being with a man and keeping him in all places whither he goes, which was said in that same field on that same night (Genesis 28:15), and His Spirit does not require a room to be arranged first.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food, and this matters for a man working nights. 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 is not going to be one here.

And nothing in this article asks anything of the four other people in that house. Nobody has to be quieter, nothing has to be reorganized, and the television does not have to go off. A practice that requires a household to accommodate it is the wrong practice.

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

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your house is like. Scripture settled that where God accepts according to what a person has (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's square footage.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, 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.