I Left Before They Got To Me

There was a list on a noticeboard in the corridor by the kitchen hatch, and it was written in blue biro on the back of an old photocopy, and her name was fourth on it.

Fourth. She had counted the three above her more than once.

They did them in batches of six, twice a year, spring and autumn, and the autumn one was the third Sunday in October, and it was the last week of September when she walked out.

She has never told the full story of why and she is not going to now, and it does not matter as much as people think it does. It was not a doctrinal thing. It was not a scandal. It was one conversation in a parking lot with a woman who did not mean it the way it landed, and then a second conversation four days later with a man who did, and something in her that had been holding a very great deal for a very long time simply went out, like a pilot light.

She stood in the corridor by the hatch on that last Sunday and read her own name on the back of a photocopy, and then she got her coat and went home, and she has not been in a church building since except for two funerals and a wedding.

Sixteen years.

And here is the thing that would surprise everybody who was in that parking lot: she has never once stopped.

She prays in the mornings. Not formally. She talks while the kettle goes. She has read the whole thing through four times in sixteen years, which is more than most of the people who were in that building, and she has a Bible with a cracked spine and a rubber band round it and about nine hundred pencil marks in it, and she knows the Psalms so well now that she gets ahead of herself and finishes them out loud.

She loves Him. That has never been in question, not for one week of the sixteen years.

But there is a thing she has done, quietly, without deciding to, and it has taken sixteen years to set: she has come to think of herself as somebody who is in this on a technicality. Outside the ordinary way of things. A person who left the corridor three weeks before her name came up, and has been living on the strength of her own morning kettle ever since, and has no idea whether that counts.

Nobody is sending you back

Let me say the thing you are braced for, so that you can stop being braced.

I am not sending you anywhere.

This page does not end with a building. There is no soft turn at the bottom where I suggest you try somewhere new, and no list of things to look for in a church, and nothing at all that requires you to walk through a door you are not walking through. If that is what you were expecting, put it down. It is not coming.

I want to talk about the technicality instead, because that word has been doing a lot of quiet damage.

And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.John 10:28

Look at what that verse rules out. Not most things. Any. Neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. There is no exception written in for a woman who left a corridor in September. There is no clause about people whose names were fourth on a list. You are in His hand and nothing that happened in that parking lot loosened one finger of it, and that is not my reassurance, it is the sentence Jesus said out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is going in rather than past.

And notice who is holding whom. The security in that verse is not located in the strength of the grip of the person being held. It is entirely in the hand. That matters enormously for a woman who has spent sixteen years quietly wondering whether her own hold has been good enough, on a kettle, on her own, with a rubber band round her Bible.

Now let me name the thing that I think actually happened, because I do not think it was leaving.

You did not lose your faith in that parking lot. You lost your placement. And because the placement went at the same time as the list, the two got welded together in your mind, and ever since then your standing with God has been quietly filed as provisional, subject to a thing that got interrupted.

You are not here on a technicality. The word says you have been given eternal life, given, present possession, and the Spirit of God has been the one waking you up early to talk to Him for sixteen years, which is not the behavior of a God who considers the arrangement irregular.

I want to say something about the nine hundred pencil marks.

You have read it through four times. You know the Psalms so well you finish them out loud in an empty kitchen. Somewhere along the line you began to suspect that this was a substitute, a sort of homemade version of the real thing that other people were doing properly in buildings.

It was not a substitute. You have been fed by the same word and taught by the same Spirit as everybody in every building, because there is only one of each, and He does not do a reduced-quality edition for people who read at the kitchen table. That is what is written, and it is why sixteen years of a cracked spine and a rubber band was never a reduced edition of anything.

And here is the last one, and this is the one I want you carrying out of the room with you.

You were never three weeks away from becoming His. That is the arithmetic that has been running underneath sixteen years and it was wrong the entire time. You were His in the corridor. You were His getting your coat. You were His in the parking lot in the conversation that put the pilot light out, and Scripture is what settles it, and the Spirit is the seal, and no noticeboard ever had jurisdiction over any of it.