gather here
It takes a hammer and a knife-sharp nail–a good, shuddering whack to the thick, fat beam, but it’s done. I step back, admiring. The sign, a small, artfully worn thing as black as night, says gather here. I hang it on the porch, where it’s sweet, simple command rounds out a semi-circle of rocking chairs–one summer-sky blue, another flat white like an empty page, another weathered and built for two. The day my friend gave me the sign, passing it over in a gift bag flower-blooming with fuchsia tissue paper, she also sat down in that blue chair, wobbling it around just a few degrees so she could look at the rest of us. “It’s just a little something, for having us over here every week,” she said, tossing her hand as though the gesture might as well go unnoticed. I find it funny that very often the most significant gifts come wrapped as something deceptively inconsequential.
What she doesn’t know, and what maybe even I don’t see until these do-life-together friends stand up again to go and the chairs rock empty, haunted by the ghosts of our raw voices, is that it took gathering here to build the place for gathering. I had tilted those rockers a dozen times, trying to get the angle right, trying to make it a place that begs for filling. Maybe it’s my quiet, introverted soul that kept missing that one thing, that more than looking out over the waving grass at the feasting birds or the butterfly sculpture twisting, we would want to look at one another. But here she comes, and without even thinking, she turns that chair just right. Sometimes, I think maybe we get it backwards. We think we have to have the spot right before we add the people.
So after my friends have gone, I hang the sign, and it labels our fellowship and calls for more with just those two simple words. Gather here. For me, it’s a whole paragraph. Those empty chairs are like empty cups, and we’re all more thirsty than we know. I walk in the house and into my office and pull a quote right off the wall, something I underlined and copied and cut, taping it where I could see it.
There’s enough time yet for picking glads in muggy August morning sunshine and filling Mason jar vases of blooms for sidelined, forgotten people. There’s time for lingering over cups of coffee and listening to the pouring out of someone’s cracked heart, time for long phone calls and shared pie and going the extra mile. And there’s time to be broken and given into all the world’s brokenness, because this is how to break time’s hold. (Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way, 63)
It’s from a beautiful book I’ve loved all the way to coffee-stains, and it’s a word about breaking time right in two, about letting Jesus break and distribute me, like bread to feed thousands. The point of it all, finished off by a hammer and some knife-sharp nails, by a shuddering whack, splitting right into a fat, thick beam, is that it’s not just about us and God. It’s not just so we would all just sit in rows with our carefully-lined lives, but that we would actually love one another; that we would gather; that we would draw into community people who come from vastly different places. We can’t love God unless we love one another. That command–love one another–occurs eleven times in the Bible, all in the New Testament. Three times, Jesus spoke them himself, right into a gathering of people. This is not about a show, He was trying to say, but about giving yourself for someone else. I put down the hammer and rest my fingers on that sign–powerful white words like light breaking the pitch of night, and I listen to the the birds trill. I think maybe our world has made entertainment out of relationship. I think maybe we’re running out of margin for gathering, for lingering. And lately, I feel moved to make space for giving and receiving, for listening. There must still be time enough to gather, because it wasn’t just that Jesus longs to gather His people to Himself, but that in the gathering, He would also draw us to each other. It took me years, running my finger over the same words, to see that the early church devoted themselves not just to teaching and prayer and breaking bread, but also to fellowship (Acts 2:42). We must not stop meeting together.
Gather here. The letters even are slightly faded in the curves, as though other fingers have touched them to remember.
I stand there nodding, because this is part of a long conversation, and I know that this sign is a Word whispered right to me.
Listen now; don’t over-complicate it: Love me. Love others.
