What I Saw When I Was Fifteen

He was fifteen and he was there because his friend's family went and he had stayed the weekend.

He is careful about how he describes it now, because he is forty three and he knows that a fifteen year old is not a reliable witness and that the people involved were probably sincere. He would say all of that first, before he said anything else, and he means it.

But he saw a woman handled roughly. That is the phrase he uses. Handled. He saw a man push down on her shoulders while she said no, and he saw people around it who thought it was fine, and he saw her afterward in the hallway being helped by two women who were not talking to her but talking over her.

He remembers thinking, quite clearly, at fifteen: nobody in this room is asking her anything.

He went home on Sunday and did not mention it, and he has mentioned it perhaps twice since, both times briefly, both times to people who changed the subject.

Here is what nobody knows.

He has wanted this for twenty eight years. Not vaguely. He has read most of what is worth reading. He has sat in the car outside two different buildings on two different occasions and not gone in. He has a real, considered, adult hunger for the Holy Spirit, and he has never once asked for anything, because he cannot get the hallway out of his head.

The sentence, unsaid: if that is what it looks like, I would rather be dry.

You may have your own hallway. The thing you watched that has been standing in the doorway ever since.

Nobody is going to defend that room

Start here, because everything else depends on it and most people skip it.

What he saw was wrong. Not misunderstood by a teenager. Wrong. A person being pushed while saying no is not a category of spiritual experience, and there is no reading of any text that makes it one, and the instinct that made a fifteen year old notice that nobody was asking her anything was a good instinct and it came from God.

He has spent twenty eight years half suspecting that his objection was worldly. It was not. It was accurate.

You were right at fifteen and it has taken this long for anybody to say so, and 1 Corinthians 14:33 puts God on record about what He is and is not the author of, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a line written to a congregation with exactly this problem and lands it on a man of forty three.

And notice where that sentence sits, because the location is almost the whole argument.

For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.1 Corinthians 14:33

That is not a line from a quiet letter. It is the middle of a long passage correcting a church whose meetings had gone chaotic. Paul is dealing with the exact thing he watched, in writing, in the first century, and he is not on the side of the room.

The letter is on his side

Consider how much of that chapter is spent on this, because the volume of it matters.

Paul does not tell them to stop. He is emphatically not shutting anything down; he says elsewhere in the same chapter that he does not want them forbidding things. What he does is spend page after page on order, on turn taking, on intelligibility, on whether an outsider walking in would be helped or would conclude everybody had lost their minds.

He is worried about the visitor in the doorway. That is a fifteen year old boy at a weekend with a friend's family.

You have the whole weight of that chapter standing behind you, because the written word spends an entire passage protecting the person in the doorway from exactly what he saw, and His Spirit is what turns that from a debating point into permission.

And read the reason Paul gives, which is not pragmatic. He does not say disorder is bad for the reputation. He says God is not the author of it. He grounds a rule about behavior in a statement about the character of God.

You were never looking at God when you looked at that hallway, and 1 Corinthians 14 names peace as what He authors and confusion as what He does not, and the same Spirit who moved a man to write that is the one who fills.

Twenty eight years of caution were not wasted

Now the thing he half accuses himself of, which is that he has let one bad afternoon cost him nearly three decades.

That is not what happened. What happened is that a boy saw something genuinely wrong and his conscience filed it correctly, and then, because nobody ever separated the abuse from the thing itself, the file stayed shut. That is not cowardice and it is not unbelief. It is a working conscience with incomplete information.

And the caution itself has value. A man who will not go along with a room is exactly the sort of person who should be asking for this.

You were guarding something worth guarding, because 1 Corinthians 14:33 makes the same distinction his conscience was making and makes it in God's own name, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a door rather than one more thing to feel behind on.