Nine Years On The Sound Desk

The tank leaks. It has always leaked, from the same corner, and the fix is a folded towel wedged under the near edge and a second one on the floor behind it, and there are exactly two people in that building who know that.

He is one of them.

He gets there at seven on those Sundays, an hour and a half before anybody else, because the tank takes fifty minutes to fill and the immersion heater has a mind of its own. He runs the hose from the kitchen. He tapes the cable down along the wall with the yellow tape, not the silver, because the silver lifts and somebody will go over on it. He tests the two handheld microphones and puts fresh batteries in both even when the old ones are fine, because you do not want to be the man who found out the batteries were fine afterwards.

Then he sits at the desk at the back with the faders under his hands and he watches.

He has watched sixty-one people go into that water. He knows this because he keeps the recordings, and the recordings are numbered, and the last one he burned to a disc for a family was number sixty-one. He has seen a grandmother go in wearing her good coat because she would not be told. He has seen a nineteen-year-old lad who shook so much on the steps that two men had to hold him and who came up shouting something nobody could make out and which is still, nine years later, the loudest thing that room has ever recorded.

He rides the fader down when they go under and up when they come up. That is his job and he is good at it. Nobody hears a bang. Nobody hears the rustle. What people hear on those discs is a room and a voice and then water, and that is because a man at the back was paying attention at exactly the right second.

Afterwards he coils the cables.

Over and under, elbow to hand, the way he was taught by a man who is dead now. He drains the tank with the pump and he mops the floor behind it and he stacks the towels in the black crate and puts the crate in the cupboard under the stairs, and then he turns the lights off in a room that still smells of chlorine and cookies, and he drives home.

Nine years. Sixty-one people. And he has never once been in that water himself.

Nobody knows. That is the part he would want you to understand. It is not that anybody said no to him and it is not that anybody forgot. It is that he became the man who makes it happen for other people so early and so completely that there has never been a natural moment for it to come up, and now there is a kind of quiet joke in the building about how he is basically part of the plumbing, and everybody laughs, and he laughs, and he coils the cables.

The man at the back of the room

I am not going to ask you why.

There is a version of this page that opens the file on you, that goes back through nine years looking for the moment it should have happened and asking what you were avoiding, and I want you to know I have deliberately closed that version. God is not holding a review meeting about you this morning. He is not going through the recordings.

What I want to do instead is get you out of the chair for ten minutes, because I do not think you have been out of it in a long time.

Here is the thing about being useful. Useful is real, and useful is good, and God is not embarrassed by a man who tapes cables down with the right tape so that nobody falls. But usefulness has a way of becoming a place to stand, and once it is a place to stand, it starts quietly charging rent. You begin to feel that your welcome in that building is connected to the crate of towels. Not consciously. You would deny it if I said it to your face. But test it: imagine you could not do it any more. Imagine your back went, and somebody else learned the desk. Ask yourself honestly what you would feel about walking into that room on a Sunday with nothing in your hands.

You are welcome in that room with nothing in your hands. Right now, as you read, before you have set anything up, before you have proved anything to anybody, before one single cable is taped. That is not my encouragement to you. That is what Jesus Himself said out loud, and the Holy Spirit in you is the reason it is landing in your chest rather than just passing your eyes.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.John 6:37

Read the second half of that sentence slowly, because it is built to be unbreakable. Not "I will probably not cast out". Not "I will not cast out those who have made themselves useful". In no wise. It is a doubled negative in the old English precisely because the promise is doubled: there is no version of coming to Him where the answer is no, and there is no route in, no back door, no service entrance for helpers.

And notice who is doing the giving and the receiving in that verse. The Father gives, the Son receives, and nowhere in the sentence is there a job description for the one arriving. You have been given to Him by the Father, and that was settled without reference to your competence. The word says it and the Spirit is the one who makes a promise like that go warm rather than stay theoretical.

I want to say something about the sixty-one, too, because I think you have been quietly doing arithmetic with them.

You have been the man who made every one of those sixty-one days work. The grandmother in the good coat had a clean recording because of you. That lad's shout exists on a disc because you had your hand on the right fader. None of that was wasted and none of it was a substitute, and I am not going to tell you it was, because it was not. You were serving the Lord Jesus in that room for nine years and He received every hour of it. Scripture never once treats a cup of cold water as a small thing, and the same Spirit who has been strengthening your hands at that desk is the one telling you now that your hands are not your standing.

Here is what I think has actually happened, and you can tell me I am wrong.

Somewhere around year three, the role stopped being something you do and became something you are. And the trouble with a role is that it has an outside. There is a room, and there is the desk at the back of the room, and after long enough at the desk, the room starts to feel like a place you facilitate rather than a place you are in.

You are in the room. Not staffing it. In it. You have been in it the whole time, and the word of God is what says so, and the Spirit is the one who put you there, and there is no chair in that building far enough back to change it.