The Platform and the Green Room

Ten minutes after. The room off the side of the stage that everybody calls the green room and that is actually a storage room with two sofas in it.

She is sitting on one of them with a bottle of water and her in-ears in her hand and her hair still up, and there is a monitor on the wall showing the foyer camera, and about four hundred people are still in there talking.

Ninety minutes. Two services. Two thousand people, give or take, and for most of that time a considerable proportion of them were looking directly at her.

She is twenty-nine. She has done this since she was twenty-two.

And what she has been sitting with for about six weeks, and has finally got a sentence for tonight, is this: the most-seen hour of her week is also the least-known hour of it, and those two facts are not a coincidence, they are the same fact from two angles.

Because she is looked at constantly. Not in a way that troubles her, particularly; she is not naive about the position and she has thought about it more than most people would guess. She means it up there. When she says something between songs it is true and she has not workshopped it.

But two thousand people watched her for ninety minutes tonight, and if you asked any one of them how she is actually doing, they would give you an answer with real confidence, and the answer would be constructed entirely out of what they saw from a seat.

And she would not correct them. That is the part. They would say she seems really solid at the moment, or that she has been leading with a lot of freedom lately, and both of those are observations about a person on a platform, and she has never once said anything to anybody that would put a different picture beside them.

Four hundred people in that foyer on the monitor. She will go out in a minute and about thirty of them will speak to her and every single one will be kind.

And you know that room. You would rather be looked at than known, and you have a position that supplies enormous quantities of the first, and the second has quietly gone missing without anybody noticing including you.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not a fake up there and you have not been performing. Psalm 139:1 says O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me, and both verbs are finished, and the Holy Spirit is in this side room with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

He corrects himself mid-sentence

There is a moment in Galatians where Paul is writing at speed, as he does, and he starts a clause and then stops and turns it round, and the correction is left in the text.

But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements?Galatians 4:9

Read that middle bit again. After that ye have known God. And then, immediately: or rather are known of God.

He starts to describe them as people who know God, which is true, and which is the way anybody would put it. And then, before he finishes the thought, he decides that is the wrong way round and says so in the letter and does not go back and tidy it.

Which is more useful than a clean sentence would have been, because you can watch him do it.

What he is doing is reversing the direction. The thing that matters, he decides, is not the knowledge that runs from them toward God. It is the knowing that runs from God toward them. That is the load-bearing one, and he swaps it in mid-clause because he wants them standing on the right one.

You are known of God, and that direction is the one holding the weight. The written word contains a man correcting himself in order to reverse which way the knowing runs, and he thought it worth the untidiness; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a side room ten minutes after a second service.

And notice who he is writing to. People who were, at that moment, going backwards. He does not reverse the direction as a reward for their doing well. He does it in the middle of telling them off.

Visibility is not a smaller version of being known

I want to be exact about the mechanism, because you have half seen it for six weeks and the precise shape of it is worth having.

Being seen and being known are not the same thing at different volumes. They are different things entirely, and a large amount of the first does not produce even a small amount of the second, which is why the arithmetic has felt so strange to you.

Two thousand people saw you tonight. If being known were the same substance in smaller units, two thousand units of seeing would have to add up to something. It does not add up to anything, because the two are not made of the same material.

And the position you hold produces the first in quantities almost nobody else on earth encounters, which means you are exposed to a very unusual illusion: it is extremely easy to feel thoroughly attended to and be entirely unknown, and to have no idea that is what is happening, because every signal in the building says you are seen.

You were not confused about your own life, and the two are genuinely different substances. Galatians 4:8 says howbeit then, ye knew not God, and Paul is tracing a history rather than assessing anybody's performance; His Spirit is the one who does the knowing, and He is not scoring your ninety minutes.

And here is the second half, and I want to be careful with it, because this is the last thing this site says and the temptation here would be to prescribe.

I am not going to. Nothing on this page will tell you what to disclose, or that it should be somebody on the team, or your pastor, or anybody in that building at all. You know that room and that staff and that congregation better than any page could, and both the thing and the person are yours to choose.

You are choosing both the what and the whom, and no page and no platform gets a vote. Proverbs 18:24 says there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother, and it names one rather than a category or a job title; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been in that side room after every service since you were twenty-two.

Thirty kind people in a foyer

Here is the practical thing, and it takes account of where you actually are, which is about to walk into a room.

In about a minute you are going out there and thirty people will speak to you and every one will be kind and most will say something about the service and several will say something about you, and you will receive all of it warmly, because you are good at that and because they mean it.

Not one of those thirty conversations is going to know you. That is not their fault and it is not a criticism of them. Those are foyer conversations and they are doing exactly what foyer conversations do.

So do not look for it out there. That is the mistake this position pushes a person toward, and it is the reason people in your job end up feeling both adored and starving: the sheer quantity of warmth in a foyer makes it seem as though the answer must be somewhere in the middle of it, and it is not, and no number of those conversations will ever build into one of the other kind.

The other kind gets arranged deliberately, in advance, in a different room, with somebody you have chosen.

You are able to go out there and receive all of it and not go looking for the wrong thing in it. Scripture says or rather are known of God, and Paul stops mid-clause to move the weight onto the direction that holds; the Holy Spirit is the one who has known you through every one of those ninety-minute stretches.

So the green room is not where you are alone. It is a storage room with two sofas and a monitor on the wall, and a woman in it who has been looked at by two thousand people and is already known all the way through by One who did not need a seat to do it.

And if what is under this is heavier than a page can carry, do not carry it alone while you decide about anybody. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing. If it has gone somewhere darker than tired, do not wait: in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a person will answer.