The Chess Club on a Wednesday

The hall is booked from seven until half past nine and the heating comes on at six and never quite catches up, so most people play in their coats until about eight.

Eleven tables. Boards that do not match. A kettle at the back and a tin of instant coffee that has been there since before anybody currently in the room joined. Ages from about eleven to about eighty-four. A retired postman who is genuinely very good and does not know it, two brothers who never play each other, a girl of thirteen who is going to beat everybody in this room within two years.

Yonatan has been coming for two years and has told nobody he prays about it.

He is thirty-eight. He teaches, and he loves the game the way a certain kind of man loves a thing that has structure in it. And every Wednesday for two years he has walked into this hall with the same request already running in him, and the request is: get me out of here.

Not out of chess. Out of this. Out of the small talk at the kettle, out of the twenty minutes at the end when the boards go away and the talk starts, out of the joke that goes a bit far and the sigh he does not let anybody see. He has been asking God to move him to a different room, a better room, a room with people who are already going where he wants to go. He has asked for it in the car afterward more times than he could count.

He would tell you this is spiritual hunger, and there is something real in it, and I am not going to sneer at a man who wants better company.

Tonight the postman beats him in nineteen moves and then, resetting the pieces, says quite casually that he has not spoken to anybody except the girl on the checkout since last Wednesday.

Says it, moves a rook back, does not look up. Not a complaint. A fact, offered the way men offer facts, in the middle of a different sentence, hoping it will not be picked up and half hoping it will.

Yonatan sits there with a lost position in front of him.

And the thing that arrives in him is not guilt exactly. It is a kind of vertigo. Because he has spent two years asking to be taken out of a room that is, for at least one man in it, the only room there is.

You know that prayer. You have prayed some version of it and you have prayed it sincerely. But you might not have noticed yet that somebody prayed the exact opposite over you first, and out loud, and on the worst night of His life.

He asked for the opposite thing, and He said so

John 17 is the last long prayer before the arrest, and it is prayed out loud in front of the disciples, which means every word of it was said where they could hear it and remember it. That is deliberate. He wanted them to know what He had asked for them.

I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.John 17:15

Read the two halves as the pair He made them. He rules out one request in order to make a different one. Not removal. Preservation. He is not asking for their environment to change; He is asking for them to be kept inside it.

You were prayed for, by name and in that shape, and it is already settled which request He made. That is the written word and not my correction of your Wednesday, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a prayer prayed on the last night and sets it down at a folding table under a bad light.

And if you want to know how seriously He meant it, look at what He says three verses later: as thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world. Sent into. That is a direction, and it is the same direction He came in.

So the request you have been making has already been considered and answered, and the answer is a no, and it is a no He gave with His arms open on the night He was betrayed, and it was not a stingy no. He asked for something better than removal. He asked that you be kept.

Kept is a bigger word than removed

Here is why the answer He gave is more generous than the one you have been asking for.

Removal keeps a man safe by taking away the test. Keeping holds him through it. One of those produces somebody who has never been tried, and the other produces somebody who has been held, and only one of those is any use to a hall full of people in their coats on a Wednesday.

Every strong thing in Scripture happens to somebody who was kept rather than extracted. Three men in a furnace, not away from it. Daniel in the den with the lions still in there. Paul in the prison writing the letters we still read. There is a pattern and it is not subtle, and the pattern is not that God cannot remove people. It is that He usually does not, and that His people are the ones He walks around inside the furnace with.

You are being kept, right now, as you read, and that is a larger provision than being taken out. John 17 says keep them from the evil in exactly those words, and the same Spirit He promised in that very conversation is the one making it a present fact in a man staring at a lost position.

Now let me guard this, because the hunger in you is not the problem and I refuse to treat it as one. You want deeper company. That want is right, and you should have it, and the man who never wants it has gone to sleep. Find it. Get around people who are going where you are going, genuinely, and do not let anybody tell you that appetite is pride.

But notice what the want turned into. It turned into a request to be relocated, and while you were making it, for one hundred and four Wednesdays, a retired postman was speaking to nobody but a checkout worker between one Wednesday and the next.