I Checked During the Second Song

It happened in the second song and Ruth has thought about almost nothing else since.

The room was singing. She was singing. And somewhere in the middle of it her hand went into her coat pocket, brought the phone up at about waist height, and she read the figure and put it back, and the whole thing took maybe six seconds and nobody saw and she was still singing when she did it.

She was not bored. She was not worried about anything. There was no reason, and that is the part that has kept her awake.

She has been in that church for eleven years. She helps with the welcome team. If you asked her what she trusts she would tell you God and she would be telling the truth, and she was not performing that morning either; she meant the words she was singing while her hand was in her pocket.

And she has been quietly appalled at herself for a fortnight.

That is the thing I want to get at first, because the appalled part is doing more damage than the six seconds ever did. She has spent two weeks constructing an account of herself in which a woman who does that during a service is a woman whose faith is not what she thought it was.

Your version may be different. It might be a funeral. It might be halfway through a conversation with somebody who was telling you something hard. It might be that there is a room in your life where you would have sworn this thing does not follow you, and one day you noticed it there.

Nobody is accusing you of anything. What happened is not evidence about your love for God. It is evidence about a habit's reach, and reach is observable.

Something has been following you into rooms.

Nothing has to be wrong for something to be out of place

Let me say the freeing thing first, and say it plainly, because you have been carrying the other thing for a fortnight.

Looking is not sin. Knowing what you have is not sin. Being careful about what you are responsible for is not sin, and Scripture never treats a person who keeps track of their own affairs as somebody of small faith. If you came here braced for a page that agrees with your worst reading of that morning, put it down. It is not true and this page will not say it.

A habit does not report on the state of your heart. It reports on where it has been allowed to go, which is a different thing entirely.

Paul writes about where affection sits, and what he does not say is as important as what he does.

If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.Colossians 3:1-2

Set your affection.

He does not say police your hands. He does not say build a rule about pockets. He goes underneath behavior to affection, which is where a hand's habits actually come from, and he gives a direction rather than a prohibition: on things above.

And look at the ground he stands it on: if ye then be risen with Christ. The setting of affection is downstream of something already true, not a way of proving it. He is not asking anybody to establish their standing by managing themselves better.

You are risen with Christ, and that was not in question in the second song. Not a standing that a six second glance could revise. The written word puts the affection instruction after the fact of the rising, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman who has been appalled at herself for two weeks.

Now let me say something about the app, because it has done nothing wrong.

It is a tool. It is a useful one. Nothing here wants you to delete it, and no rule is coming about where you may or may not stand while you open it. The trouble is not that it exists. The trouble is that a tool has learned the whole map of your life, including the rooms you thought were kept.

You are not being asked to become careless. The written word never rebukes a person for knowing where they stand, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a woman who keeps track.

And now the fortnight, because that is what needs lifting.

The shame has been telling you that the glance revealed something about your love. It did not. It revealed the reach of a habit that installed itself over years without ever asking you, and a habit's reach and a heart's allegiance are not the same measurement.

You are not further from God than you were before that song. Where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God, and that seat did not move during the singing. The Holy Spirit was in that room with you and in your coat pocket and did not think one hard thing about you.