Alone In A Comfortable Room

Denise can see it, and there are forty people in that room, and every single one of them is a good person, and not one of them can see it.

She wants both halves of that said, because the second half is what makes it unbearable.

If they were bad people it would be simple. If there were something wrong in that room, something cynical or self-serving or cruel, she would know what to do with it and she would have known years ago. She has dealt with rooms like that before and she is not frightened of them.

This is not that. These are people she would trust with her house keys. Several of them have carried her through things. The one she would most like to be able to explain it to is a woman who sat with her for two nights in a hospital corridor eleven years ago and has never once mentioned it since.

And Denise sits in that room, warm, welcomed, genuinely loved, and sees something that none of them see.

She has tried to say it about four times over three years. Not badly. She is not clumsy and she does not lecture. Each time it landed somewhere between polite agreement and gentle redirection, and each time the room moved on, comfortably, without anybody feeling that anything had happened at all.

And afterwards she goes home and does the thing she has never told anybody about, which is that she sits in the car on the drive for a while before she goes in.

Here is what she said to God in that car last month, and it was not a nice prayer.

Am I the only one who can see this?

You have your own version. There is a room, and it is full of decent people, and you are alone in it in a way that has nothing to do with being unloved.

Nobody here is going to confirm what you see. I do not know your room and it would be reckless to validate a specific thing I cannot examine.

But the complaint you made in the car is in the Bible, almost word for word, and what happened next is worth having.

He made the complaint twice and God took it seriously both times

There is a scene on a mountain where a prophet says exactly this, and the thing to notice first is how it is received.

And he said, I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.1 Kings 19:10

I, even I only, am left.

Now, that is not accurate. God says so a few verses later. But look at what does not happen in between.

He is not corrected on the spot. He is not told to stop feeling sorry for himself. Before a single word of answer, he is fed twice by an angel and allowed to sleep, and the text spends more verses on the food and the sleep than on the theology.

And then, when the answer comes, he is asked a question rather than given a lecture, and he gives the identical speech again, unchanged, word for word, and God does not sigh at him for repeating himself.

And your complaint is not being managed. That is not my reassurance: the written word lets a prophet say this twice, in full, without editing him, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman sitting on her own drive with the engine off.

And you are not required to be accurate about your own isolation before you are cared for. The word feeds him before it corrects him, and the Spirit is the one who makes that order real in somebody who has been bracing for a correction since they opened this page.

The answer He actually gave

Here is what God says at the end of it, and it is the reason this article exists.

He tells him that there are seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed. Seven thousand. Elijah, who has just said twice that he is the only one, has been out by seven thousand.

Notice what that answer is and what it is not.

It is not: you were wrong about what you saw. The state of the nation was exactly as bad as he said, and God does not soften one word of the diagnosis.

It is: you were wrong about being alone.

Those are entirely different corrections, and only the second one is issued. The sight stands. The isolation was the error.

And you are almost certainly not the only one. That is not my optimism: the written word puts the number at seven thousand in the mouth of God Himself to a man who was certain he was the last, and it is the Spirit who makes that a live possibility rather than a nice story about somebody else's mountain.

And the ones you cannot see are not hiding from you. They did not come and find Elijah either, and the text never explains why, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person hold that without turning it into a grievance about the seven thousand.

What that changes in a comfortable room

Now, practically, because a number in a story is not much use on a Saturday morning.

It changes the question you are asking in the car.

Am I the only one who can see this is a question with no available answer and it corrodes. It has no evidence that would settle it, so it runs continuously, and it turns a room full of people you love into a room you are performing in.

Who else might be seeing something is a different question entirely, and it is answerable, slowly, by ordinary means.

Denise, if she thought about it, could name two people in that room who go quiet at particular moments. She has never once connected that to anything. She has been so certain of her isolation that she has not been looking.

And you are not being asked to organize anybody. Nothing here suggests you go and build a faction, and the Spirit of God has never once worked through somebody gathering the like-minded against a room, so if that is what rises reading this, it is not Him.

And you are known in that room by God whether or not you are understood in it. The word says the Lord knoweth them that are His, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit, which means the loneliness is real and the aloneness is not.