He Spoke to a Man as a Friend

There are five people in that flat and one of them is eleven months old.

He has worked out, over about two years, exactly what he would need. A room with a door. Forty minutes. Nobody awake in the flat. Something to write on, and no expectation that he will be interrupted, because the expectation of interruption is worse than the interruption.

He has had that combination perhaps four times since the baby came.

So he waits. Not passively, he is not a passive man. He plans for it. He has twice got up at half past four to construct it artificially and both times somebody else woke up, and the second time he sat on the edge of the bath and laughed, and it was not entirely a happy laugh.

Here is what he has never said out loud, to his wife or anybody at the mosque of his own church.

He has begun to think of this period of his life as a spiritual gap. Not a hard season, which would be honest. A gap. A stretch of years in which the actual thing is not available to him and he is holding on until the children are older and the conditions return.

His eldest is four. On the current plan he resumes at about fifty two.

Look at where that sentence happened

There is a description in Exodus of the most direct conversation anybody in the Old Testament has with God, and everybody remembers the phrase and nobody thinks about the address.

And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.Exodus 33:11

Now think about where that tent was standing.

It is pitched outside a camp of somewhere between one and two million people, depending on how the numbers are read, living in tents with all their animals, their children, their cooking, their arguments and their livestock, in a desert with nothing to absorb sound.

There is no silent room anywhere in that chapter. There is no forty minutes with a door. Every single person in that story is living in the loudest and least private conditions a human being can live in, and it is in the middle of that arrangement that the sentence face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend gets written.

You are able to hear Him at the volume your life actually runs at, and the clearest conversation in the whole book happened beside a camp of two million. That is what the word actually places it, not encouragement I am offering you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that plain to a man on the edge of a bath at half past four.

The conditions are a picture, not a requirement

Now the plain thing, brother, because that picture did not come from Scripture.

It came from photographs, and from other men's accounts of their own good seasons, and from a general idea in the air that this thing requires quiet, solitude, unbroken time and a notebook.

None of those are bad. If you get forty minutes, take them. But you have converted a pleasant set of circumstances into a set of entry conditions, and the conversion happened without anybody deciding it, and now you are living as a man locked out of his own faith by a toddler.

And nothing about your household has ever been an obstacle to His voice. Scripture puts the friendship conversation next to two million people and their animals, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a door to close.

Pick the noise you already have

Here is the practical piece, and it is designed for the life you've got rather than the one you're waiting for.

Pick one recurring noisy moment and make it the place.

Not a quiet one. A noisy one, that already happens, every week, without you arranging anything. The washing up. The twenty minutes in the car with the children in the back. The walk to the shop. The stretch at half six when everything is happening at once.

That is now the place. Not a substitute for the forty minutes. The place.

You are met in the noise you already have, and the meeting does not require you to build anything first. He promised to be found by those who seek Him, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a kitchen at half six into the tent outside the camp.