I Came In Through the Side Door

Faris sits at the back and to the side and he has done for eleven years.

He did not decide it. That is what he says when anybody mentions it, and it is true. There was no evening where he chose a seat. He sat there the first month because he was new and it seemed correct, and then he sat there because it was where he sat.

He came to this at thirty-four.

Everybody around him was raised in it. That is not a complaint; they are good people and they have never once made him feel like an outsider and several of them would be genuinely upset to read this. But they know the songs without looking. They know how the stories end. They had a grandmother who said things.

He learned it as an adult, on purpose, the way you learn a language you were not born speaking. He is good at it now. He is better than most of them on the actual text, because he came to it with a grown man's attention and he read like somebody who needed it.

And there is still the thing.

He is a guest who has been made extremely welcome.

That is the sentence he found for it eventually, and finding it did not fix it.

His son is nine. Born into this. Knows the songs without looking.

And at a family service in the winter the boy said something back from memory, in the middle of a room, without thinking about it at all, the way you would say your own address.

And Faris felt something go through him that was not joy.

It was a small grief, and he knew immediately what it was: his son has a thing that he does not have and cannot get. Then, about four seconds later, he felt ashamed of the grief, which is worse, and he said nothing about it to anybody for a month.

He said it eventually to Tewodros, who is about eighty and who has known him since the first month at the back.

And the old man listened to the whole thing without interrupting.

And then he said, "You came in the front door. There is no other door."

Now let me ask you where you sit.

Because if this is yours you have a seat, and you did not choose it, and if you look at it honestly it is at the edge of something you were told eleven years ago you were fully inside.

Fellow citizens, not guests

Paul is writing to people in exactly your position, and he is not gentle about the category.

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God's household.Ephesians 2:19

No longer strangers and aliens. Those are legal words. A stranger is a person with no standing, and an alien is a resident with no citizenship, and both of them live somewhere on somebody's permission.

He says: not that. Fellow citizens. Household.

And a household is not a hospitality arrangement. Nobody in a household is there because they were welcomed well. They are there because of who they belong to.

Now put beside it the sentence Paul writes at the top of the same letter, because the two go together and the second one is the one that settles it.

He says that God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.

Before the foundation of the world.

Read what that does to your timeline. You came to this at thirty-four. The people around you came to it at six, and their grandmothers came to it at nine, and every one of those dates is a date on which somebody arrived. Not one of them is the date on which they were chosen.

The choosing has no date in it that anybody was present for.

So hear this said over you, in a chair at the back and to the side. Your late arrival was only ever late in your own experience, and in God's it was not late at all, because the decision about you was taken before there was a world for you to arrive in. That is written into the first chapter of Ephesians in exactly those words, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described three verses later as the seal and the guarantee on that, and a seal is not something a guest is given.

Now let me handle the grief, because I am not going to talk you out of it and it does not need talking out of.

Your son has something you do not have. That is true.

He will not remember not knowing. He will have a smell and a light and a song from before he had words for any of it, and that is a genuine gift and you cannot manufacture it and it is right to feel something about that.

But look what you have done with the fact. You have taken a difference in memory and read it as a difference in standing.

He has an earlier arrival date. He does not have an earlier choosing, because there is no such thing. There is one choosing and it happened before the foundation of the world and it does not have positions in it.

And here is what you have, which he will spend his life needing and possibly never quite getting: you know exactly what it cost to come and exactly what it is like on the other side. That is not a lesser thing. Half the New Testament is written by a man in your position and he never got over it, and the not getting over it is what makes the letters what they are.

The written word says you were brought near by the blood of Christ, and brought is the operative word: somebody moved you, and it was not you. And the Spirit of God is called the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry Abba, Father, which means the word you use for God is put in your mouth by the same Spirit that puts it in a child's.

That word does not come out differently because you learned it at thirty-four.