The Room Where They Still Think You Are Fine

Denise has said the word fine about forty times this month, and it has been true on none of those occasions.

Not because she is a liar. She is not, and anybody who has known her ten minutes would tell you she is the most straightforward person in that building. She has never in her life constructed an elaborate story about herself and she would be no good at it if she tried.

She has simply been asked a question in a room, and the question was not really a question.

That is the thing about how are you doing. It arrives in a hall, over a cup, in a doorway on the way to somewhere else, and it is genuinely meant and it is also, structurally, an opening pleasantry, and the person asking it has about eleven seconds available. Everybody knows this. Nobody has ever agreed it out loud.

And Denise has an answer that would need considerably longer than eleven seconds, and would change the temperature of the room, and would make the person who asked it wish they had not, and none of that is their fault.

So she says fine, and she smiles, and it is not a lie exactly, it is a wall built out of one word because there was no time to build anything else.

What got her was a Sunday when a woman she does not know well asked her, and she said fine, and then heard herself do it, and then had a thought she has not been able to shake since.

She thought: nobody in this room knows.

Not one of them. She is in a building full of people who love her, several of whom would genuinely drop everything, and there is not one of them who has the first idea, and it has been eight months.

Now hear me before we go one step further.

I am not going to ask you how it happened. Not anywhere on this page. Whether the loss was your doing or somebody else's or nobody's changes nothing about a single word of this, and there is no point in this article where you have to give an account of anything to anybody.

And nobody here is telling you to go and tell that room. I am not going to hand a private woman a piece of homework that involves informing a building full of people about her business. You may have very good reasons. Some rooms should not be told and you probably know which ones.

You have your own version. There is a room and a word and a number of times you have said it, and you did not need me to describe hers.

The robe came before the speech was finished

There is a moment in that story everybody knows, and the sequence in it is the whole message.

But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet.Luke 15:22

Go back one verse and look at what is happening. The son has started his speech. He had it prepared, he had rehearsed it on the road, and he gets partway through it.

And the father is not listening to it. He is talking to the servants.

The robe is called for while the boy is still explaining. The ring goes on a hand that is still in the middle of an account of itself. The whole apparatus of the welcome is set in motion before the accounting is finished, and the accounting is never finished, because the text simply moves on and nobody ever comes back to it.

That robe is the point for a woman standing in a hall with a cup. Because a robe is a covering, and it is put on somebody who is dirty from a road, and it is put on before they are cleaned up.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are covered now, not once you are presentable. That is not my sentiment: the written word puts the robe on before the speech ends, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land on a woman who has said fine forty times this month.

And your account is not being waited for. The word says he was yet a great way off and his father saw him and had compassion, and every verb of the welcome comes before any explanation, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person believe that about herself rather than about a character in a story.

Your welcome was never priced

Here is the thing this whole set exists to say and it belongs right here in the loudest possible terms.

Nothing about how you are received depends on what is in your hands.

Not the eight months. Not the loss. Not the forty times you said fine and not whether you ever tell anybody. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, and every clause in it is shutting a door on the idea that a welcome has ever had a figure attached to it.

And your standing did not move when the money did. Not down and not up: it was not higher in the good year, and it is the Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which is a statement about parentage rather than about a balance.

And nobody in heaven has been waiting for you to say something out loud in a hall. The word says the Lord knoweth them that are His, and knoweth is not a matter of announcement, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a comfort rather than an exposure to somebody who has told nobody.