You Are Not Auditioning

Twenty two years, and she still sits at the end of the row nearest the door.

Not for a quick escape. She would tell you it is so she can get out and put the urn on without disturbing anybody, and that is true, and it is not the reason.

She has done the flowers for eleven years. She has done the rota, the fabric, the tea, the two funerals nobody else could face. When her name was read out at the front the year she joined, her sister came, and there is a photograph of it somewhere in a drawer.

And if you sat her down and asked her, gently, whether she is one of them, she would go quiet and then say something about not liking to presume.

You can hear it clearest in how she prays. Every single night, at the side of the bed, in the same order, and it always opens the same way.

I know I have not been very good this week.

That is the first line. It has been the first line for a very long time. Then a short account of the week, honestly given, with the failures listed accurately and the good bits left out because putting them in would be showing off. Then the requests, kept modest. Then thank you for everything, amen.

Twenty two years of opening statements.

She is not miserable. She would be genuinely surprised to be told she was struggling with anything. She is simply a woman who has spent two decades in a room she is not sure she is on the list for, being useful, at the end of the row, near the door, in case.

Somebody decided, and it was not the panel

Here is the line, and I want you to hear it as it was written: not as a puzzle handed to clever people, but as comfort posted to a congregation of ordinary ones, in the middle of a paragraph that is simply praise from beginning to end.

He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish before Him in love.Ephesians 1:4

Now, this passage answers exactly one question, and it is worth naming the question before anything else gets attached to it.

The question is: who decided?

Not, how many. Not, about whom else. Who. And the answer is that He did, and He did it in Christ, and He did it before the foundation of the world, which is to say before there was a world, before there was a you, before there was a single week of yours to give an account of.

Sit in that for a second, because it is doing something specific to your bedside prayer.

If the decision was made before you existed, then nothing you did after you existed caused it. And that cuts both ways, and the second way is the one you have needed for twenty two years: if your good weeks did not earn it, your bad weeks cannot lose it. The decision was never running on your form. It was never a review. It has not once been reopened.

This is the ache under this whole tradition, if you want to know why anybody made a fuss about it in the first place. It was never an abstraction to those people. They were being governed by men who could take their livings and their pulpits and occasionally their lives, and the thing they held onto was that the decision about them had been made somewhere that no crown could reach and no committee could revisit. Sovereignty is not a cold word. It is what you hold when the panel is against you.

And now the plainest thing on this page, and I want it said without a single qualification anywhere near it.

You are not on the outside of this.

If you are lying awake wondering whether you are one of them, look at what that worry is actually made of. It is made of wanting Him. That is the entire substance of it. Indifference has never once kept anybody awake. The ache in you tonight is not evidence against you, it is the very thing His hand was on before you had a name, and He said plainly that whoever comes to Him He will never cast out, and He did not attach a clause to it and neither will I.

So the door is not the question. It never was. The question is only whether you are going to keep standing in it with your coat on.

Because here is what the auditioning has actually cost you, and it is worth counting.

Twenty two years of arriving early. Twenty two years of being useful in case usefulness is what is being assessed. Twenty two years of the good bits left out of the prayer in case mentioning them looked like a claim. A woman who has done the flowers and the rota and the two funerals nobody else could face, and who cannot sit in the middle of the row.

Nobody is going to tell you that the serving was wasted. It was not. It was love, most of it, and He saw every bit of it.

But you were doing it in the wrong tense. You have been serving to get in. You are in. You have been in since before the world was, and the whole of the rest of your life is not an application, it is a thank you.

So hear this said over you, halfway into a prayer you have already started defending. You are not auditioning and you were never on trial, and the decision about you was taken before there was a world for you to perform in. That is written into Ephesians in exactly those words, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named a few verses later as the seal on it, which is not something anybody hands to a candidate.