A Full House And Nobody Came

You are nine years old and there are nine people in this house.

You could name every one of them and you could name where each one is standing, because you have listened to this house your whole short life and you know it the way other children know a song. The television is on in the front room, too loud, the way it always is when there are this many in. Somebody is washing and somebody else is drying and they are talking about a car. Two of the men are on the back step with the door propped open because the kitchen has got too warm. Your cousins are on the floor in front of the fire, arguing about whose turn it is.

Nine people. A full house. This house is never empty and it is never, ever quiet.

And you are at the top of the stairs.

You are not going to describe this part. Not here, not tonight, not to anybody, and nothing in this message is going to ask you to. There is no form to fill in and no detail anybody needs from you before the rest of this can be said.

What matters, and it is the only thing that matters at this moment, is that you called.

Maybe not with your voice. Children call in whatever way is available to them, and sometimes calling out loud is not one of the options, so it goes out with the whole body instead, from the top of a staircase, in the direction of a room with nine people in it and a television on too loud.

And nobody came.

Somebody laughed downstairs. The conversation about the car carried on. The program ended and another one started and you heard the theme music begin, and at some point you went back along the landing and got into bed and lay on your side facing the wall.

In the morning there was toast, and somebody teased you about something, and the house was full and loud again by half past eight.

That is the whole of it, and that is what you have been carrying ever since. But you have not been carrying it flat. You have been carrying it in a particular shape, and the shape is this: if a call could go out in a house with nine people in it and nothing happened, then the house was not the thing that failed.

The call was.

You have believed something was wrong with your call since you were nine years old, and you have organized an entire adult life around never making another one.

The one thing that has to be said first

Isaiah 63:9 is the verse for tonight and it has to be read slowly, because everything turns on where God is standing in the sentence.

It was written about people who cried out in a place where nothing visible arrived, and the Holy Spirit kept it in the record for somebody who was going to need it at the top of a staircase a very long time later. You were heard that night, and the hearing never once depended on anybody downstairs.

In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.Isaiah 63:9

Read the first clause again. Not above the affliction. Not arriving after it. In it. Scripture puts God on the inside of the thing, and the same Spirit who carried that line into the book has been holding it over a nine year old on a landing ever since. You were accompanied in a place where you could see nobody, and that is not a kind sentence somebody invented for you this evening.

Now the second thing, and it is a promise about what this message will not do. The silence is not going to be explained here. Nobody downstairs is going to be defended, no reason is going to be supplied for a door that did not open, and Scripture hands out no explanations for that kind of thing either. His Spirit does not require the silence to be made sensible before the call can be answered. You were heard, and the hearing is not waiting on anybody in that house ever accounting for themselves.

Those two sentences have to sit side by side without one softening the other. He was in it. It should not have happened. Both.

Look now at the specific conclusion a child reaches, because the conclusion is the actual injury and it has outlived everybody in that front room. An unanswered call in a full house teaches a boy that the fault is in his calling. Psalm 34:17 says the cry gets through and the Lord hears it and delivers, and the Holy Spirit was the one carrying that cry all the way up out of a house with the television on. You have a call that has always worked, and it worked that night.

One plain paragraph, because this is the message where somebody reading it may be a long way down. If what has come up while reading this includes any thought of ending your life or of quietly not being here any more, tell one living human being tonight. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, emergency services, or the crisis line where you live. Making that call is not a failure of faith and nobody who makes it becomes a burden to whoever answers it. God puts real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for those hands is obedience rather than defeat. The first call in this message went unanswered. This one does not.

Notice what God does with the carrying in Isaiah 63:9. He bore them and He carried them, all the days, and the Spirit of God is not describing a rescue that turns up neatly at the end of a story. That is a carrying that was going on the whole time, including through years when nothing about it was felt by anybody. You were carried through a decade you have no memory of being carried in.

There is one more thing about the noise, because the noise is part of the wound and it almost never gets named. A quiet house that fails a child is at least legible afterward. A loud one leaves a person unable to explain to a single adult why a house full of relatives was the loneliest room he has ever stood outside. Scripture never measures a person's aloneness by the number of people in the building, and the Spirit of God has never once confused a full room with company. You were alone in a crowded house, and both of those words are exactly accurate.