Six Years Without Looking Up

There is a window at the end of that aisle and it is genuinely good. Somebody who knew what they were doing made it in about 1904.

He knows it is there in the way you know your own front door is green. He could not tell you what is in it. He knows there is blue at the top because he has seen the blue on the floor in the late afternoon, and that is the whole of his information after six years.

He walks under it something like a hundred and forty times a year.

Down the aisle at the start, back up it at the end, and about eleven other times in between for the chairs and the box of things and the man who needs a hand.

His head is down for all of it. Not sad. Working. He is thinking about the microphone that cuts out, and whether anybody has phoned the family from Tuesday, and the fact that they are eleven short of what the boiler is going to cost.

And in June a woman who had never been in that building before stood in the middle of the aisle for about ninety seconds with her head back, and then said to him on the way out that she had not expected it to be so beautiful.

And he said yes, it is lovely, isn't it.

And walked to the car thinking: I have no idea what she saw.

Fixing your eyes is an instruction, not a mood

Let me be clear about what this is not, because there has been enough of that particular sermon.

This is not a piece telling you that you have lost your first love because you think about boilers. Somebody has to think about the boiler. The head down and the list running is what has kept that building open, and the woman in June walked into a warm dry room with the chairs out because a man had his head down.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a criticism: looking up is not a mood you are failing to have, it is an instruction you have not been given time for. That is not my kind reading of six years, it is what stands written in Hebrews, where fixing the eyes is put in the imperative in the middle of a passage about endurance, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line was in an aisle in June while a stranger stood with her head back.

Read it, and notice the company it keeps.

Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.Hebrews 12:1-2

It is not addressed to people on a retreat. It is addressed to people who are running, and running a long way, and struggling.

Fixing the eyes is what the writer prescribes for the running. Not a reward at the end of it and not a thing for the ones who have time. It is the mechanism by which anybody keeps going, and it is written as a command because it does not happen by itself in a man who is carrying things.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a lighter season: you are permitted, and in fact instructed, to look up in the middle of the work, because the written word puts fixed eyes inside the race rather than after it and the Spirit of God is the one who has been holding a window over your head for six years.

Now let me say the thing about the window, gently, because it is not really about the window.

You have been walking through that building without seeing anything in it for six years. That is what happens to everybody who works in a place, and nothing written calls it a spiritual failure, and the Holy Spirit is not keeping a tally of unraised eyes. Nurses stop noticing wards. Nobody who lives by the sea looks at the sea in February.

But there is a cost and you felt it in the car park.

A man who has not seen anything in that building for six years is a man who is not being fed by it, and a man who is not being fed is running on the boiler and the microphone and the phone call to the family from Tuesday. It works for a while. It works for a surprisingly long time. It does not work forever, and you are six years in and a stranger just told you the room is beautiful and you had nothing to say.

What is written puts the fixed eyes in the middle of the race precisely because the running is what makes a man stop looking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranged for a woman to stand in your aisle in June with her head back.

And the guard, and it is the whole of the category: through, not at. Nobody is telling you to admire glass. What is written puts a Person at the end of the looking, and the window is 1904 and colored and the light on the floor is only the first thing on that line.