What a Small Room Can Hold

He wrote nothing

Simeon Nsibambi died in 1978, an old man, in the house he had barely left for thirty-seven years.

He left no books. No famous sermons, no collected letters, no journal that has come down to us. Almost every sentence attributed to him in this book reaches us second-hand, through people who heard him or wrote about him afterwards. Even the question that changed his life — there is something missing in me and in the church, can you tell me what it is — survives in slightly different words depending on who is telling it.

By almost any measure we normally use, that is a thin record. And yet the movement that came out of that hillside weekend ran for the better part of a century across five countries and has not stopped.

What actually survived

It is worth being precise about what carried, because it was not the things we usually try to build.

Not an organisation. Nsibambi did not run the revival; there is no institution he founded that we can point to as his. Not a body of teaching — he wrote none. Not a method, not a brand, not a network he presided over. He resigned his only formal position and then, for most of the remaining decades, could not leave his house.

What survived was a set of habits in other people. Confess your sin out loud. Walk in the light with each other. Ask people about their souls. Expect God to fill you and do not settle for less. Those things spread person to person, which is a slow and unimpressive method, and also the only one that does not decay when the founder stops attending.

Kivengere had it. Luwum had it, and it cost him his life. Neither of them learned it from a book of Nsibambi's, because there wasn't one.

The uncomfortable comparison

Set that against what most of us are quietly hoping to leave behind, and the contrast is not flattering.

We would like to be remembered. We would like there to be something with our name on it — a work, a role, a reputation, a body of output that proves the years were not wasted. This is not a wicked desire, but it is a fragile one, and Nsibambi's life is a fairly direct challenge to it. He has no output. He has descendants in the faith.

And notice that he could not have engineered this if he had tried. Everything that made him influential was, from his point of view, either a loss or an embarrassment: he gave up his position, he was thought insane by his neighbours, and then he was taken out of circulation entirely by an illness nobody could even name. If he had been asked at any point to describe his strategy, he would have had nothing to say.

What this asks of you

Not that you resign anything. Not that you seek obscurity, which is its own kind of vanity if you seek it.

Only this: that you stop measuring your life by what will be visible afterwards, and start measuring it by what is true of you now. Are you hungry? Are you honest with someone? Do you pray when nobody is counting? Is there any person who is different because of what you have said to them about God?

Those questions have nothing to do with scale, and they are the only ones this story rewards. A man asked them of himself in 1929 with no idea what would follow, and the honest truth is that he never really saw what followed — he was indoors for most of it.

A hidden fire

The image the whole story keeps returning to is fire, and it is worth taking the metaphor seriously for a moment, because fire is a poor illustration of everything we usually mean by influence.

Fire does not spread by planning. It spreads by contact. It does not need the first flame to remain lit in order to keep going; it needs something next to it that will catch. A fire that has spread does not remember which spark began it, and does not need to.

Nsibambi's flame was lit on a hill in Kampala over two days, and for the last half of his life it was hidden inside a house where hardly anyone saw it burning. It went on being fire the whole time.

Whatever God does with your life, He is unlikely to consult you about the shape of it. He did not consult Nsibambi. What was asked of him was the same thing that is asked of you: be genuinely hungry, be honest with somebody, hold nothing back, and keep praying when the visible part of your usefulness has been taken away.

That is the whole of it. It is not a strategy. It has never needed to be.

A prayer

Father, I want to be remembered, and I am not sure that is a holy wish. Take it, and give me instead what You gave him: a real hunger, an honest friend, nothing held back, and the willingness to burn where nobody is watching. Let something outlive me that does not have my name on it. Amen.