Dispatch #1
A room I didn’t know was there
I want to tell you about a room.
It’s not a metaphor, exactly, though it isn’t a place you could drive to either. I close my eyes, get quiet, and there it is: a long room with wooden walls, a plain wooden table down the center, benches on either side. Nothing grand. Nothing that would make a good painting. Just a room, and a table, and a place to sit.
I didn’t design it. I didn’t imagine it into existence the way you might daydream a beach house. It has taken the shape it has now over time, the way a room in your own house slowly fills in with furniture and habit until it feels like it was always that way.
The very first time I went looking, it wasn’t a room like this at all. The walls were mist, white and undefined, nothing solid enough to call a wall. The only thing clear in the whole scene was Jesus, standing at the center, speaking with an angel. When he noticed me, he turned, smiled, and took me by the arm.
Let’s walk and talk, he said.
That was the whole of it that day, an encounter more than a place, glory more than furniture. I was immediately reminded of the old hymn:
And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
That room didn’t stay that way. Over time the mist gave way to something plainer and more permanent, this same long room with wooden walls and a wooden table, the kind of place you’d expect to find rather than a vision you’d expect to see. I’ve come to think that was not a lesser version of the first encounter, but a kinder one, the way overwhelming glory eventually settles into the steady comfort of a place you know how to walk into, already furnished by a relationship you didn’t have to build that morning.
I go there by doing something almost embarrassingly small. I open a notebook and write, “Hi, Jesus. I love you.” That’s the whole beginning. No incantation, no special posture, nothing that would look like anything if someone walked in on me doing it. And then, more often than not, something like an answer comes, and I write that down too. I love you too.
I’ve since watched other people try the same small thing, and it doesn’t always land the same way for everyone. Let me tell you about Phil. He was the outlier.
Phil belonged to a prayer group I was teaching, and journaling was on the agenda for the evening. We began with teaching, then moved to the actual task of writing down our flowing conversations with Jesus. There we were: journals open, soft music playing, everyone stilling their hearts before the Lord. After a few quiet moments, people began priming the pump with that same opening line, “I love you,” and hearing something answer back, I love you too. Pens started moving. Slowly at first, then faster, everyone finding a rhythm they hadn’t expected to find so quickly. When we shared afterward, the room was full of quiet astonishment. Everyone had written something. Everyone but Phil.
“I got nothing,” he said. Then, wanting to be sure he understood what we were even claiming, he asked it plainly. “Am I hearing you right? That the conversation I’m writing down is actually me talking to Jesus, and Jesus talking back to me?”
“Yes, Phil. That’s exactly right.”
The room was already excited, and Phil’s question, and the honesty behind it, only added a little more courage to the air. People wanted a second try. We stilled ourselves again and picked our pens back up. Phil tried again too, slower this time, hesitant, but resolute. He wrote his opening line and waited. After a while, he wrote something down. Then, after a while longer, something else.
When our time was up, we shared again. Phil went last. He opened his journal and read what his own pen had written.
“I love you, Lord Jesus.”
I love you too, Phil.
“I have a big question.”
Go ahead, Phil. Ask it.
“Is this really you, Lord Jesus?”
Yes, this is really me.
I laughed for an evening over that one, not because it was silly, but because it was so unguarded, so exactly what a person actually needs to ask the first time.
I don’t have a tidy explanation for how any of this works, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. What I can tell you is that Scripture has always assumed something like this room exists. Paul talks about Christ dwelling in us. Jesus talks about making his home with anyone who loves him. I used to read those as lovely ideas, true in some abstract sense, the way we say a country lives in our hearts on a holiday. I don’t read them that way anymore. I think he meant an actual dwelling, an actual room, and an actual invitation to come sit down.
That’s all this first dispatch is, really. Not a lesson, not a method, just a door, and a small true thing that happened when I walked through it. There will be more rooms, more conversations, more strange and ordinary things to report back. For now, I just wanted you to know the room is there.
