The Last Night Of Camp

Fifteen, and the last night, and a marquee with a floor made of interlocking plastic tiles that came apart if you jumped.

The band had been building the same four chords for what felt like a very long time and was probably eleven minutes. There was a smoke machine, which somebody had been overenthusiastic with, and the lights were cutting through it in those solid-looking beams, and the girl next to him was crying and so was the enormous rugby-playing lad from Newcastle who had not stopped taking the mickey out of anybody for six days.

And something went through him. He is not going to pretend it did not. It went through him like heat and he could not have told you where it started.

He went forward. About sixty people went forward. The next morning, in the gray, in the field by the tents, a man in rubber boots did it in a horse trough that had been scrubbed out and filled with a hose the night before, and it was freezing and everybody laughed and it was one of the best mornings of his life.

He is thirty-four now.

And what he has never been able to do, in nineteen years, is separate the two things. The four chords and the smoke and the eleven minutes and the enormous lad from Newcastle crying, on one side. God, on the other. He does not know where one stopped and the other started, and every so often, usually when he is tired or when he hears one of those four chords in a supermarket, the question arrives fully formed: was that Him, or was that the room?

He has read about it, which did not help. He now knows the terms for what a crowd does to a fifteen-year-old and the terms are all quite unkind and he cannot unknow them.

He has also, and this is the part he would want you to hear, never stopped. Nineteen years. Through university and a period he does not talk about and a marriage and two children. He is not a man whose faith is in question in any practical sense.

But there is an unsettled account with that marquee, and it is the one thing in his life he has never been able to file.

You were never the one who had to separate it

I want to start by agreeing with you about the room.

The music was doing something. That is true. Four chords held for eleven minutes with a smoke machine going does something to a fifteen-year-old, and the terms you have read for it are broadly accurate, and I am not going to insult you by pretending a marquee is a neutral environment.

So let us not spend a paragraph on that. It was a room and rooms do things.

Here is the question I want to put in place of the one you have been asking. You have been asking how much of it was God?, which requires you to run an analysis on your own fifteen-year-old chest, nineteen years after the fact, with no instruments. It is not that the question is forbidden. It is that it is unanswerable, and you have been standing at it for nineteen years the way a man stands at a locked door with the wrong key, trying it again periodically.

The answerable question is: what is holding me now?

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:38 and 39

That is one of the longest lists in Scripture and it is a list of everything Paul could think of. And what strikes me about it, for you, is that it is a list of powerful things: death, angels, principalities, powers, height, depth. Paul reaches for the strongest forces available and says none of them can do it.

A smoke machine is not on the list. Neither are four chords, nor a crowd, nor the emotional weather of a marquee on the last night of camp. Not because they are too weak to be worth mentioning, but because the sentence has already covered them by covering everything.

You are not separated from the love of God by anything, and that includes the things you cannot analyze, and that is not my reassurance to a man with an epistemological problem, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is arriving in the unsettled place rather than in the reading part of your mind.

Now let me say the thing I actually want to say, which is about the separating.

You have taken on a job that was never assigned to you. Somewhere at about seventeen you appointed yourself the auditor of your own conversion, and you have been trying to run an audit for which no records exist, in a jurisdiction where nobody has ever been asked to produce them.

You were never the one who had to separate it. God knows exactly what He did in that marquee and exactly what the room did, and the two have never been confused at His end, and the word says the love that holds you is in Christ Jesus rather than in your ability to reconstruct an evening. The Holy Spirit knows precisely what God did in that marquee and precisely what the room did, and He has never once needed you to tell the two apart.

I want to say something about the horse trough, too, because I think it has been slightly overshadowed by the marquee.

A field in the gray. A man in rubber boots. A trough scrubbed out and filled with a hose. Everybody laughing because it was freezing. No smoke machine, no lights, no four chords, and you have called it one of the best mornings of your life.

You have had the evidence in your own hands for nineteen years and filed it under the wrong heading. The Spirit of God does not need a lighting rig, and the word says nothing in the whole created order separates a man from that love, and a cold morning by some tents with everybody laughing sounds a great deal more like Him than a smoke machine ever did.

And here is the last of it. You are held today. Not on the basis of a correctly diagnosed evening in a marquee, but on the basis of a love that Paul could not find a force strong enough to interrupt. The word settles it and the Spirit in you is the deposit, and the account with that marquee can close unaudited, because it was never in your name.