As I’ve reflected on What Will Remain?, I’ve begun imagining a room.
Books line the shelves. There are comfortable places to sit, golden lamps, and candles glowing in tucked-away corners, inviting you to take a seat at the table. Something personal lives in the details.
I can picture myself there. Depending on where you find me, I might be thinking with a tobacco pipe in hand, writing with a pen, or reading a Bible or book alongside someone who has come to make this space their place, too.
I wonder what we might accomplish there.
What might someone write, discover, or begin to understand? What could take shape through a conversation neither of us had planned? And long after someone leaves the room, what might remain with them—and with me?
I imagine this room of Providence welcoming the questions each of us has been carrying.
Some questions might come easily. Others might take several visits before we find the words. Would I listen carefully enough to understand what you were asking? Would you give me that same patience? When an answer challenged us, would we be willing to examine it together?
Could we leave something unresolved without rushing to fill the silence?
There would be work to do in such a place: Scripture to study, words to weigh, stories to receive, and ideas to put into practice. I would hope we could return to something we had said and admit that we needed to think again.
Rainer Bantau, who writes as The Devotional Guy, recently offered a simple encouragement in “Monday | Show Up”: be present and faithful with the people and responsibilities before you. In our conversation beneath that post, I mentioned something another brother had shared with me—“presence over performance.” That seems worth remembering as I imagine these chairs being filled.
There is something of that hospitality in Rosie Meadow’s writing, too. In her recent welcome to guest writer Delores Adams, Rosie invites readers to join them at the meadow bench. She makes space for another person’s words and gives us somewhere to continue listening.
I would like this room to offer that kind of welcome. Someone could bring a question, a story, or something they have written, and find people willing to give it their attention. We might follow a thought into another person’s work and discover something we would have missed on our own.
I imagine God’s blessing over that place—over the words spoken, the work undertaken, and the people welcomed into it. I pray that what grows there would serve Jesus Christ and bear good fruit in the lives of those who enter.
That hope gives me something to practice before the room exists.
If you could pull up a chair in this room, what question, passage, or unfinished idea would you bring?
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