I Am The Only One In My Family

Sunday lunch is twenty-two people when everybody comes, and everybody comes.

Three tables pushed together across two rooms, and the children eat first standing up, and there is a point at about two o'clock when four separate conversations are happening at full volume and his aunt Rosaura will say something across all of them that stops the entire house.

He loves it. That is the first thing and it is not a qualification.

He came to faith at thirty-one, in the worst year of his life, and it did not happen in a room with anybody in it, and there was no moment where he told the family because there was nothing that looked like a moment.

They know he goes somewhere. His mother thinks it is good for him and says so, and once, memorably, defended him to a cousin who was being funny about it, which he has never forgotten.

He is thirty-nine.

And the thing he has never worked out is how to ask for anything without it becoming an event.

Because that is how that house works, and it is not a criticism. A thing said to his mother on a Tuesday is known to everybody by Sunday, and by lunch it will have been discussed twice and there will be a plan. If he needed a car, four people would find him a car. When his sister was ill there were eleven people at that hospital inside two hours.

It is a great gift and it is also, for this, an impossible mechanism.

He has rehearsed asking. Not asking the family. Asking somebody at the place he goes, quietly, on a weekday. And every rehearsal ends the same way, at the same point, which is the moment he imagines it coming back round to that table, and Rosaura saying and why did we not know, and it not being a small thing, and it never being a small thing again.

The room where it is decided

I want to say something about your family before anything else, because you love them and I am not going to be clever at their expense.

The mechanism that makes this hard is the same mechanism that put eleven people in a hospital in two hours.

That is not an accident and it is not two separate things about that house. A family where nothing stays quiet is a family where nobody is ever left alone, and you cannot have the second without the first, and if you were offered a trade tomorrow you would not take it and we both know that.

So the difficulty is real and it is not a fault in anybody.

Now let me put underneath you the thing that has already happened, because I think it is the piece you have never had words for.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

Look at the word adoption, because Paul is using a legal term and using it deliberately. In that world adoption was not sentimental. It was a formal act that placed a person into a family with full standing, and it was, notably, irreversible in a way that birth was not.

And notice the word he leaves untranslated. Abba. He is writing in Greek to a Greek-speaking church and he keeps one word in the household language, the ordinary domestic word a child uses at home.

You have received the Spirit of adoption and you are in a family where you may use the household word, and that is not encouragement for a man at a crowded table, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing rather than being read.

Now let me say the thing that matters most on this page.

You have been living as though the decision about your standing gets made at that Sunday table.

It does not. It was made eight years ago, in the worst year of your life, in a room with nobody in it, by a formal act of adoption which is on record and which Rosaura will find out about eventually and which was never hers to ratify.

You are already in a family, fully, with standing, and Scripture puts the adoption in the Spirit's hands as something received rather than negotiated, and the Spirit of God has been the one crying Father out of you since a year you would not want to live again.

I want to say something practical, and then I am going to stop, because you know that house and I do not.

You have been rehearsing the whole sequence. The asking, and the coming back round, and the table, and the question. And you are stuck at the sequence rather than at the first step, which is a very common and very exhausting place to be stuck.

Find one person, on a weekday, and ask them one question. Not about arranging anything. About whether a thing could be done quietly, and what that would look like.

That is where I stop. I am not going to tell you which person or which place or whether to tell your mother first, because those are yours and anybody deciding them for you from a distance is guessing with your family.

You are not waiting on that table. The word says the adoption is received and the Spirit is the one who cries Abba out of a person, and the standing was settled before anybody at any lunch had an opinion about it.

You have received the Spirit of adoption, which is a legal act placing a person in a family with full standing. The written word keeps the household word in the sentence on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been crying Father out of you for eight years.