Absent In The Flesh, Present In The Spirit

At two in the morning the depot has a sound, and it is not silence.

The yard lights buzz. A refrigerated trailer runs by itself over near the fence, cutting in and out on its own schedule all night. The kettle in the dispatch office boils, clicks, and goes quiet, and forty minutes later it does it again. Somewhere out on the road a truck is coming in that he will book, and until it does there is nothing to do but sit with a mug and the low hum of a building that is awake for no reason except him.

Behind the desk there are four clocks on the wall, because the freight comes from four places, and somebody screwed them up there years ago and wrote the city names on strips of tape underneath. He watches one of the four tick past six.

Morning there, he thinks. And then he goes back to the paperwork.

It has been two years since he was in the same room as another person who believes any of this. There was no falling out and no crisis. There was a move, and then the night shifts, and night work quietly removes a man from every hour that other people keep, and two years went by in a way he could not narrate to you if he tried.

You have your own version of that. The shift, or the sickness, or the road, or the country, or the body that does not do stairs anymore, or the town where you are the only one and you have checked.

And you have a word you use for everything that is not in the room. A call is a substitute. A screen is a substitute. Praying alone at two in the morning is very definitely a substitute. And underneath the word substitute there is a harder word that you have never actually said out loud, and the word is lesser.

He wrote it to a city he had never walked in

There is a sentence in the letter to Colossae that will not behave the way people expect it to, and it is worth two minutes of a night shift.

Start with a fact about who wrote it and where. Paul speaks in that same chapter about his struggle for the believers at Colossae and at Laodicea and for as many as had not seen his face in the flesh. He had not been there. Another man had carried the message to that town. Paul is writing to a congregation of people he had never met, in a city he had never walked in, and this is the sentence he chooses.

For though I be absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the spirit, joying and beholding your order, and the stedfastness of your faith in Christ.Colossians 2:5

Read what he did not write. He did not write that he wished he were there. He did not write that he thought of them often, or that he hoped to visit soon, or that he was sending his warmest regards across the miles. Those would all have been true and any one of them would have been ordinary.

You have the whole thing tonight, undiminished, in a building nobody else is awake in. Colossians 2:5 was written to people its author had never once stood beside, and the Holy Spirit is the reason he could say he was with them and mean it plainly.

He writes that he is with them. Present tense. Then he goes further than any polite man would, and says he is joying and beholding, which is the language of a man watching something happen in front of him. He claims to be seeing them.

That is not a consolation prize being handed to somebody who could not make the trip. It is a claim, stated plainly, by a man who elsewhere ached to be physically present with people and said so freely. He knew exactly what he was missing. He simply refused to let absent in the flesh mean absent.

You are present with God's people at two in the morning, and the miles hold no authority over that. Colossians 2:5 is a man's own handwriting on the matter, and the same Spirit who moved his pen is the one joining you to people you will never meet.

You have a share in this that is not reduced by a single inch of distance. Scripture makes the claim in the present tense and never apologizes for it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it a fact rather than a nice piece of writing.

A substitute is a word for something that replaces something

Now let me take that word off you, because it has been doing a great deal of quiet damage.

A substitute stands in for the real thing while the real thing is missing, and it is inferior by definition. That is what the word means. So when you call your two years a substitute, you are not describing a situation. You are handing down a verdict on yourself, every day, in a word you did not examine.

So examine it. What is it a substitute for? The room. Fine. Then answer this: is the room the thing that joins a person to the people of God?

It cannot be. If proximity were the mechanism, then everyone in a room would be joined, and you know perfectly well that is not so, because a man can sit in a full room for six years and be joined to nobody in it. Rooms hold company. They have never once produced kinship, and every honest person who has ever been lonely in a crowd already knows it.

The joining is done somewhere else, and Scripture says exactly where. By one Spirit we are all baptized into one body. One Spirit, one body, and no clause about the floor plan.

You were joined to this body by one Spirit and never by proximity, and that joining has never once been subject to geography. 1 Corinthians 12:13 puts the joining in the hands of one Spirit, and it is the same Spirit who holds it in place, which leaves the distance nothing to take hold of.

So the word substitute has nothing to attach itself to. You cannot have a poor version of a thing that was never the thing. What you are missing is company, and company is a real and good gift and the missing of it is a real grief, and I am not going to talk you out of that grief or hurry you through it. But company was never what held you in. Losing company is a loss. It is not a demotion.

Right now, as you read, you are as fully in the body of Christ as any person standing shoulder to shoulder with somebody else tonight. The promise stands as written and has had no condition attached to it since, and His Spirit is the one keeping it current at two in the morning in a building nobody else is awake in.