You Can Bring Him The Empty

The last chair goes on the stack at about twenty to eleven and Beverley is the one who does it, because Beverley is always the one who does it.

Four hours. Ninety-something people. A woman in the second row who needed somebody to sit with her for forty minutes afterwards and got it. Two teenagers who came in for the free food and stayed for the whole thing, which is the sort of thing Beverley will remember for years.

And now it is twenty to eleven and there is one other person in the building, Ivorine, who is doing the kitchen, and the strip light at the far end that has never worked properly is doing its thing.

Beverley sat down on a stacked chair, which is not what they are for, and she put her hands flat on her knees.

Ivorine came out with two mugs and sat on the one next to her and they did not say anything for a while.

Then Ivorine said, "You all right?"

And Beverley said, "I've got nothing."

Ivorine said, "Nothing what?"

And Beverley said the thing that she has never said out loud to anybody in eleven years of doing that Thursday: "I have talked people into the presence of God all night and I have not got one thing to bring in there myself. Not one. I'm empty."

Ivorine drank some of her tea.

Then she said, "So bring that."

Beverley said what.

"Bring the empty. You've been telling people all night to bring what they've got. Bring what you've got."

Beverley said afterwards that she sat on a stacked chair under a broken strip light and laughed, and then did not laugh, and then said, out loud, in an empty hall, "I have got nothing tonight."

And she said the strangest thing about it is that it did not feel like a confession. It felt like handing something over.

You may be in the same position. You may be the one who does it, whatever your version of it is, and there may be a specific loneliness in being the person who carries other people toward something and arrives there empty yourself. And nobody has told you that the empty is bringable.

The Psalm Where The Offering Is A Complaint

There is a psalm written by a man in a cave, and the word he uses for what he brings is not one anybody would put on a poster.

"I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble."Psalm 142:2

Complaint. That is the word. And the verb is poured out, which is the language of an offering, the same language used for something being brought and given.

He is not confessing. He is not repenting in that line. He is bringing the state of himself, and Scripture prints it and keeps it and sings it, which tells you exactly what God thinks of an honest empty.

You have something to bring, and Scripture already named it and put it in the book. Psalm 142 uses offering language for a complaint and never once apologizes for the contents, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a cave psalm and sits it down on a stacked chair under a broken strip light.

And look at the second half of the line. I showed before Him my trouble. Showed. He is not fixing it first and then bringing it. He is displaying it. He is putting the thing on the table in the state it is actually in.

You were never asked to arrive with it already sorted out. That is what the written word does with a person at the end of their rope, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that arrive as permission rather than as a point about Hebrew vocabulary.

Nobody Is Grading The Contents

Now the part that has to be said plainly, and it is for a specific person.

If you are the one who carries other people, there is a particular trap that comes with it. You know how this is supposed to sound. You have heard hundreds of people bring things to God and you have helped them do it, and because of that you have a very well developed sense of what a good one sounds like.

Which means that when you have nothing, you know it does not sound like a good one, and so you do not bring it.

Beverley could have led somebody else through exactly this in about ninety seconds. She has done it. She would have been gentle and clear and completely right.

The trap is not hypocrisy. It is that competence at helping other people bring things makes a person self-conscious about bringing their own.

You are not being assessed on the quality of what you bring. It is written that a broken and a contrite heart He will not despise, which is a sentence about what He does with the least presentable thing a person has, and His Spirit is the one who has been in that hall all evening including the part after everybody left.

And say the guard, because this is where a freeing thing turns into a demand. Nothing on this page is a requirement. No words, no state, no minimum, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere at all. If you sit on that chair and say nothing whatsoever, you are exactly as much His at twenty to eleven, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming one more thing for somebody who already does everything.