The Corridor Is Not a Test

At eleven o'clock at night, in your room, with the door shut, you can say anything.

You can hold the phone up and say a whole sentence about Jesus straight into it, out loud, in your actual voice. You can put the song underneath it. You can pick the bit of the lyric that has been living in your chest all week and let it play over a video of absolutely nothing, the ceiling, the window, your hand, and post it, and by half past eleven fourteen people have replied and four of them you have never met and one of them is a girl in Manila who says the same song got her through her exams.

It is not fake. That is the first thing, and I am going to keep saying it. That was real. You meant every word of it and you would mean it again tomorrow.

And then it is twenty to twelve the next morning, in the corridor between maths and lunch, and somebody says, not even nastily, "wait, do you actually believe all that?"

And there is a small laugh. Not a cruel one. That is almost the worst part, because a cruel one you could push back on. This one is just a laugh, from someone who is not trying to be horrible and is definitely not going to stop and have a conversation about it, and the bell has gone, and you have got about three seconds.

And you say, "yeah, kind of."

And then you say something about the homework.

And then you walk to the next lesson, which takes ninety seconds, and you replay those three seconds approximately forty times, and by the time you sit down you have decided something about yourself that is not true.

Here is what happens between eleven at night and twenty to twelve the next day. The room changes. That is all. In your room with the door shut there is time, and nobody interrupts, and you can say the whole sentence. In a corridor there are two hundred people moving in four directions and a bell going and roughly three seconds available, and nobody, in the entire history of the world, has ever said anything true about the thing they love most in three seconds while walking.

Everybody has volume settings. Adults have them too. They just have longer corridors and better excuses.

So I am not going to spend this article telling you off for going quiet, and I am not going to hand you a dare. You get spoken to like that quite a lot, and it does not help, and mostly it just adds a new thing to be bad at.

I want to tell you something else, and I want to say it straight, because you are not a beginner and I am not going to talk to you like one.

The corridor is not an exam room

Somewhere in the replay, the corridor got promoted.

It became a test, with a mark at the end of it, and the mark decides whether the eleven o'clock version of you was telling the truth. That is the thing that hurts on the walk to the next lesson: not the laugh, but the verdict that goes with it. Three seconds of a fast conversation get turned into evidence about your whole faith.

The corridor is not an exam room. It is a corridor. It is loud, it is short, and it has never once in its life been an accurate measurement of what anybody actually believes.

You are not a trainee believer waiting for the real thing to start. Scripture has God answering a young man who tried to get out of a job by pointing at his age, and the answer is not to come back when he is older, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that line off an ancient page and puts it in a school bag.

But the LORD said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.Jeremiah 1:7

Read what God does not say there.

He does not say the boy is wrong about being young. He does not argue with the fact. He simply refuses to accept it as a reason, because the sending had already happened, and once you have been sent, your age has stopped being the relevant piece of information about you.

You have the Holy Spirit now, at the age you actually are, in the actual corridor. Scripture says God promised to pour out His Spirit on all flesh, and named sons and daughters in the same breath as the old men and the servants, and the Holy Spirit did not arrive at your youth group with an age restriction on the door.

Now let me say the other half, because half a truth here does damage.

Going quiet in that corridor is not a failure, and it is also not a rule. You are not being told to speak and you are not being told to stay silent. What I am taking off you is the scoreboard. There is no running total. Nobody in heaven is keeping a tally of corridor conversations, and the God who sent you is not standing at the end of the hall with a clipboard.

You were never handed the job of convincing anybody of anything. Scripture says one plants and another waters, but God gives the increase, so the outcome was never sitting in your three seconds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does in a person what no perfect answer has ever managed.

That takes a weight off that you might not have known you were carrying. You are not the argument. You are not the proof. If somebody in that corridor comes to know Jesus, it will not be because you found the exact right sentence between maths and lunch, and if they do not, it will not be because you did not.

Somebody has been reading you all year, in a slower language

There is a line about a letter that I want to put in your hands, because I think you have been reading yourself completely wrong.

Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God.2 Corinthians 3:2

You are already being read, and it is not your voice they are reading. Scripture calls a believer a letter written with the Spirit of the living God rather than with ink, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding the pen, which means the reading has been going on all year while you thought the page was blank.

The person who noticed you did not join in when the group turned on somebody last term. The person who has watched you be strangely, consistently kind to the boy everybody finds annoying. The one who saw you not laugh once. Nobody made an announcement about any of it, and it has all been legible for months.

You have far more courage than the corridor is capable of measuring. Scripture says God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, and a sound mind is exactly the thing that knows a fast corridor is the wrong room for a real conversation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies all three of those without waiting for you to feel brave first.