Was The Welcome Only For The Good Year

Sile has begun to suspect that everybody who loves her has only ever met one version of her, and it is not this one.

She would not have thought of it in those words a year ago. A year ago she was busy and it did not come up.

But she has had some time recently, more than she wanted, and a thought arrived in one of the quiet stretches and would not leave, and it goes like this: I have always been the one who arrives with something.

Not money, necessarily. Capacity. She is the person who turns up able. She brings the thing that was needed, or the answer, or simply the steadiness that changes a room, and she has done this for so long and so naturally that it is not a strategy and never was. It is just what being Sile has looked like in every room she has walked into since she was about twenty.

And now there is nothing in her hands.

She is not being dramatic about it. She is not in danger and she is not alone in the world. It is simply that for the first time in her adult life she would be arriving somewhere as a person who needs something, and she has never once done that, and she does not know what she is to those people if she is that.

The suspicion is not that they would turn her away. She does not think that and she would tell you so. The suspicion is smaller and colder and harder to say out loud, and it is this: she does not know, because it has never been tested, and she is not sure she wants to test it with the only people she has.

Now hear me before we go any further.

I am not going to ask you how it happened. Not once, anywhere in this. Whether it was your doing or nobody's makes no difference to a word of this and there is no point in this article where you have to account for anything.

And nobody here is going to tell you that your friends will be fine about it. I do not know your friends. That sentence gets handed out constantly by people who have never met anybody involved, and when it turns out to be wrong it does real damage, and I am not going to spend somebody else's relationships to make a paragraph land.

What I can tell you about is a different welcome, and I can tell you about that one with total confidence, because it is written down and it is not a matter of my opinion.

You have your own version. Something in you has begun to wonder which version of you has actually been received all these years.

Paul writes a list, and he was clearly trying to be exhaustive

There is a passage at the end of Romans 8 that reads like a man reaching for everything he can think of.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:38

Look at the shape of it. He is not making a general statement. He is listing, and the list is deliberately wide, and then he does the thing at the end that gives it away: nor any other creature. He has run out of categories and he does not want anything getting through the gap, so he closes it with a catch-all.

That is a man writing to people whose circumstances were about to get considerably worse, and who would have had very good reason to wonder whether the arrangement held under those conditions.

His answer is a list with the door welded shut.

And notice what is absent from it. There is nothing in that list about capacity. Nothing about usefulness, nothing about what a person brings, nothing about which version of them turns up. Things present covers this year. Things to come covers whatever you are dreading. And any other creature covers the version of you that has never been met.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are not separated, in the version of yourself you are in tonight. That is not my reassurance: the written word closes every category it can think of and then closes the gap, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman in a quiet stretch she did not choose.

And this is the love you have always been held by, not a reduced form of it. The word says the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, and it is the same one in every line of that list, and the Spirit is the one who sheds it abroad in a heart rather than leaving it a doctrine to be reasoned with.

Your welcome was never priced

Here is what this whole category exists to say, and this is the article that needs it most bluntly.

Nothing about how you are received by God has ever depended on what is in your hands, or on which version of you arrives.

And you were never welcomed for your capacity. Not once: the word says while we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly, and without strength is the exact condition you are worried about being seen in, and it is the state the whole arrangement was made for, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this is where you have always stood.

And the version of you that has nothing to bring is the one that was actually met at the start. That is not a consolation, it is the order of events: the word says not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a memory a woman can stand on rather than a fact she was taught.

You have never been the one arriving with something. You only started doing that afterwards.