I Think Everybody Else Remembers Theirs

There are eleven apartments in that building and you have decided something about all of them.

You have decided that in ten of them, people keep these in their heads. That they think of the thing, and it is there, and they go on with their afternoon.

And that in one of them, a woman keeps a piece of paper, and that woman is you.

You have never checked this. Not once. There has never been a conversation on that landing about it, and there never will be, because nobody brings it up.

So what you have is not information. It is a picture you assembled out of a silence, and you have been living inside that picture for years.

I want to say the honest thing about silences before we go anywhere else. A silence is not evidence. It is the absence of evidence, and a person can put absolutely anything into it.

You have put into it the idea that you are the only one. Somebody else on that landing, in a different apartment, on a different evening, has put the identical idea into the identical silence.

Yet I have left me seven thousand

There is a moment where a prophet tells God he is the last one, and God's answer is a number.

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him. (1 Kings 19:18, King James Version)

Seven thousand. Elijah had said, I only am left. He said it twice, in two separate speeches, and he meant it, and he was not lying.

He was simply wrong, and he was wrong by seven thousand.

You are one of a number that nobody has counted for you, and no honest belief that a person stands alone has ever once made it true. 1 Kings 19:18 says yet I have left me seven thousand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that solid for a woman who has counted her building and got one.

Notice what he had to go on. He had a real experience of being alone. He had run for his life. He had genuinely not seen anybody else, and his evidence was his own eyes.

His conclusion was reasonable from where he was standing, and it was still wrong by seven thousand people.

You have been reasoning correctly from what you could see, and being reasonable from a landing has never once been the same thing as being right. The Holy Spirit is the one who supplies what a person could not have seen, and it is written that the seven thousand were there the whole time he thought he was the last.

And there is one more thing worth having, which is where those seven thousand were. They were in Israel. Not in another country. Not far away.

They were in the same place he was, doing the same thing he was, and neither he nor they had any idea about the others.

You were never as alone as the arithmetic in your head has been telling you, and no silence has ever once been able to keep seven thousand people hidden from each other for good. The Spirit of God is the one who knows a number nobody has counted, and Scripture puts the seven thousand right where the man who felt alone was standing.

What a silence actually contains

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not change what you believe about your neighbors.

Think about why this subject never comes up on a landing. It is not because it is a settled matter. It is because it is slightly embarrassing, and slightly embarrassing subjects do not come up between neighbors.

Nobody discusses it. Which means nobody knows what anybody else does. Which means every single person in that building is working from the same silence, and putting into it whatever they are most afraid of.

You are working from the same empty silence as everybody around you, and nothing has ever once been learned about a neighbor by not asking them. The Spirit of God is the one who breaks a silence that several people are keeping separately, and 1 Kings 19:18 supplies a number to a man who had assembled his own.

And here is the fact nobody has told you, because it is one of those things everybody assumes everybody knows. Nobody holds these in their head. It is not possible and it is not done.

The ones who look as though they do are using something. A book, a card, a note, a page, a system a nephew set up. There is always something. The only difference between people is whether anybody ever told them their method was ordinary.

That is a gap in the teaching. It is not a gap in you.

You have never once been the only person in that building doing this, and a method every person on earth is using has never been the thing that marks somebody out. The written word answers a lonely man with a headcount, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman what her neighbors are actually doing.

Ask one person

Now the small thing, and it is one question asked once.

I am not going to suggest a conversation about how any of this feels. That is not needed and it would be far too large a thing to bring to a landing.

Ask one person how they keep track of theirs.

You are able to ask one plain question of one person, and one ordinary question has never once been an intrusion on anybody. 1 Kings 19:18 answers a man's loneliness with a number, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when a woman asks a thing nobody on that landing has ever asked.

Ask it as a plain practical question, the way you would ask somebody where they get their bread. How do you keep track of yours?

Not, do you find this hard. Not, am I the only one. Those are questions about you, and they invite reassurance, and reassurance is not what you need.

You need information, and the question that gets information is the practical one.

You are asking for a fact rather than for comfort, and one practical question has never once obliged anybody to say something kind. The Spirit of God is the one who puts a practical question in a person's mouth where a plea for comfort would have gone, and it is written that the answer to being alone came as a count rather than as reassurance.