The Photograph In The Brochure Is Mine

They came in March and took photographs for two hours.

Three people with lights, moving your things four inches to the left and then back again, asking you to stand somewhere and then asking you to move.

You did not mind. It was actually a good day. Somebody had noticed the room, and you have loved that room since the week you took it over, and you have put more into it than anybody knows.

The picture came out in the spring material. It is a full page. It is beautiful, honestly. The light through those windows is exactly what you see at half past four in October and somebody caught it properly.

There is no name on it.

Not yours, anyway. There is a name across the bottom of the page, in the same letters that are on the front of your building, and there is nothing anywhere that says which room it is or who keeps it.

And here is the thing you cannot resolve.

You are proud of it. Genuinely. You have looked at it more times than you would admit and there is a real gladness in it.

You are also hollowed out by it, and the hollow arrived about eleven seconds after the pride, and the two of them have been sitting in the same chair since March.

You have decided that means one of them must be false. That either the pride is vanity, or the hollowness is ingratitude, and that a better person would only have one of them.

That is not true. There is a man in the gospels who had both at once and said so out loud, and the church has been quoting him ever since without noticing what it cost him.

He must increase

John is at the height of his work and his own people come to him upset, because everybody is going to the other one now.

He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3:30, King James Version)

That is not a shrug and it is not a defeat. Read the two verses before it and you find him describing himself as the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears the voice, and whose joy is fulfilled by it.

Both are in the same breath. Joy fulfilled, and I must decrease. He does not pretend the second one is painless and he does not let it cancel the first.

You have been holding two true things at once, and John 3:30 shows a man doing exactly that without either one making the other a lie. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person be glad and diminished in the same hour, and He does not require anybody to choose.

That is the release, and it is worth taking slowly.

The pride is not vanity. You made a room beautiful and somebody photographed it and it looked like what it is. That is a real thing and it belongs to you.

You are permitted to be glad about that photograph, and Scripture puts fulfilled joy in the mouth of a man on his way to being smaller. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps gladness clean in a person, and it is written in John 3 that the friend of the bridegroom rejoices greatly.

And the hollow is not ingratitude either.

Something real happened and was not attributed. A person notices that, and noticing is not a character flaw. John's own disciples noticed on his behalf and he did not scold them for it.

You were never wrong to feel the absence of your name, and the written word records that ache without correcting anybody for having it. The Holy Spirit is the one who is gentle with a woman who has been grading her own feelings since March.

The friend of the bridegroom

Now let me go further, because there is more in that passage than permission.

John does not describe himself as the ignored one. He describes himself as the friend who stands and hears the voice, and who is glad because of it.

That is a position, not an absence. The friend is in the room. The friend is close enough to hear. The friend has something the crowd does not have, which is proximity.

You are the room. That is what the photograph actually says, whether or not it says your name.

You have the position of the one who is close rather than the one who is named, and John 3 treats that as the greater place rather than the lesser. The Spirit of God is the one who reorders what counts as standing, and He has never once ranked people by whose letters are on the page.

There is something else in it that is easy to miss.

That room in the photograph is going to bring people through your door who would not otherwise have come. They will walk into your building because of a picture of your floor.

And you will be standing there when they do.

You are the one who is actually going to meet the people that picture brings, and it is written that the friend of the bridegroom stands and hears the voice himself. The Holy Spirit is the one who arranged for the proximity rather than the credit, and John 3:30 is where that order is written down.

The name on the bottom of the page cannot serve anybody a thing. Only the woman in the room can do that.

Look at it once, on purpose

Here is the practical thing and it is very small.

Go and look at the photograph. On purpose, not by accident, not while doing something else.

And say out loud, to yourself, that the floor in it is yours. Say it plainly. That is my floor. I keep it. That light at half past four is mine because I am there at half past four.

You are saying a true thing rather than claiming anything, and John 3:30 has already made room for a person to be glad and unnamed at once. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a sentence said to a page and settles a thing that has been unsettled since March.

The reason to say it out loud is that the two feelings have been arguing silently for months and neither one has ever been given the floor.

Say the true one out loud and the argument stops, because there is nothing left to establish. Both were always allowed.

You have been permitted this whole time to hold both of them, and the written word puts fulfilled joy and honest decrease in the same sentence. The Holy Spirit is the one who does that work in a person, and He has been waiting since the spring material came out.

Then go back in and keep the room the way you keep it.