Dens and Caves of the Earth

Somebody wrote a letter to people who were losing things.

Nobody knows for certain who wrote it. The letter says the people it went to had already paid for their faith. They’d been made a public spectacle. Their property had been taken, and the letter says they took even that joyfully. But that was earlier. Now it keeps telling them not to throw away their confidence and not to grow weary, which tells you they were close to both.

So the writer made them a list.

By faith Abel. By faith Noah. By faith Abraham, who went out not knowing where he was going. By faith Moses. By faith Rahab, with her profession still attached. And then, partway down, the writer seems to look up at how many are left and give up on doing it properly.

And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets.

The time would fail me. There were too many of them.

Then the writer says where they’d been. Not what offices they held. Where they were standing.

They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.

Deserts, mountains, dens and caves. That’s the address list of the people God used.

Read the rest of the record with that line in your head and a pattern shows up that’s hard to stop seeing.

David was a shepherd and a soldier and never a priest. Amos bred sheep and dressed figs. Nehemiah carried the wine to a foreign king. Joseph ran a grain program out of a government office in Egypt. Ruth picked up leftover barley in a stranger’s field. Lydia sold purple cloth. Priscilla and Aquila made tents. Paul wrote letters from a prison. Jeremiah, a priest’s son, did his most lasting work after he’d been banned from the temple. Mary Magdalene got the biggest news in the whole book in a garden, early on the first morning of the week.

Almost nobody in Scripture who changed the world did it from inside the religious building. They did it from fields, courts, prisons, shops, kitchens and roads.

Samuel is on that list too, and Samuel grew up in the tabernacle. That matters, and it’s the reason this book throws no stones. The building was never the problem. It was just never the requirement.

The same letter says one more thing, a chapter before the list, and anybody who has left a building has probably had it quoted at them.

Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another.

That verse is real, and this book isn’t going to talk around it. The writer could see some of those tired people drifting off on their own, and said plainly that it was a mistake. Faith was never meant to be carried alone. The word the New Testament uses for the church, ekklesia, means an assembly, people gathered together, and the letter treats that gathering as something a person needs, the way you need a meal.

But look at what the verse asks for. Not a building. Each other. Exhorting one another. The first gatherings met in houses and shops, because that’s where the people were. One chapter of this book is about a cloth dealer and a couple who made tents, and the church met in their homes.

So the gathering matters, and nothing here says otherwise. What the people on this list show is that it was never the only place God got anything done. Most of their work happened out in the field, the court, the prison and the road. And when Mary Magdalene had the biggest news in the world, the first thing she did was go and find her people and tell them.

The second thing the record does is keep their failures in.

Not a few small ones. Abraham handed his wife over to two different kings to save his own skin. Moses killed a man and hid the body. David had a loyal soldier killed to cover what he’d done with the man’s wife. Jacob cheated his brother and deceived his father, who was old and couldn’t see. Elijah asked to die right after the biggest win of his life. Jonah was angry that God forgave people he hated, and the book about him ends before he says whether he ever got over it.

The versions most of us grew up with sanded those parts down, usually with good intentions. The effect was to make the people in the book look like a different kind of person than the one reading it. Cleaner. Surer. Qualified in some way we weren’t.

The record doesn’t do that. It leaves the laundry out on the line where anybody can see it, and it keeps the names on the list anyway.

This book is for a particular reader, and you’ll know in a page or two whether it’s you.

It’s for someone who used to be inside something. A church, most often. Sometimes a company, or a title, or a calling that answered the question of who you were for a long time and then stopped asking. You left, or it left you, or it changed until you didn’t recognize it. And somewhere in the leaving a conclusion got drawn, quietly, without much argument. Whatever I was for happened in there. What’s left is a decent life and a lot of afternoons.

This book is sixteen lives that say otherwise.

It isn’t a case against the church. Nobody in here is indicted, and nobody who stayed is the villain. It isn’t a comeback story, and it isn’t a plan to get you back into a building. There’s nothing to join at the end and nothing to sign. It’s the record, read plainly, for somebody standing outside.

A word about who’s talking, once, and then I’ll get out of the way.

I spent twenty-five years on church staffs. I left in 2006 and haven’t been back on a Sunday since. I didn’t write this because I’ve figured it out. I wrote it because these sixteen people kept me company on the outside, and they read differently from out here than they ever did from the front of the room. After this paragraph I’m mostly not in the book, which is how it should be. It isn’t about me.

Here’s how it works.

Each chapter is one life. It starts in a scene from the text, tells what the person did and what they carried, and says one true thing their life shows. That thing gets said once. You’ll know it when you get there.

Then comes a short section called Where this meets your week. It’s a handful of ordinary situations where that life touches yours: the first Monday with nowhere to be, the person who took over your old job, the parent who needs you now, the name you don’t want forgiven.

Then one thing to do. Every one of them can be done alone, this week, with no building, no title, and nobody’s permission. None of them is a role. They’re small on purpose.

Read the chapters in order, or start with the name that caught your eye. Each one stands on its own.

Every quotation and reference has been checked against the text, and where the book leans on tradition instead of Scripture, it says so. Keep a Bible open if you have one. Don’t take my word for any of it.

The writer of that letter ran out of time partway down the list.

This book has a little more room. Six of these sixteen lives are on that list. The other ten would have fit. Every one of them did the work from somewhere you could be standing this afternoon.

Start wherever you are. So did they.