Never Officially Anything

She is seventy nine and it came up because of a form for something at the surgery, which is where a great deal of theology gets done.

There was a box for religion. She has filled that box in a hundred times over her life and never thought about it, and this time she sat with the pen and could not think what to put.

Not because she has any doubt. She has none. She could not tell you what to write in a box.

Because here is what she worked out, sitting in that waiting room with a pen.

She has been going somewhere her whole adult life and she has never been received anywhere. There was no moment. Her family moved when she was small, and the place they went to did things one way and the place her people came from did things another way, and the two never got sorted out, and by the time she was old enough to sort it herself she was already forty and it seemed absurd to start.

So she has attended for sixty years. She has served, sung, cleaned, cooked, sat with the dying and driven people to hospitals. And there is no roll anywhere with her name on it. No register. No card. Nothing filed.

And she is seventy nine, and she has started to think about the end of things the way you do at seventy nine.

And the thought that came in that waiting room was: I have never officially been anything, and I do not know what that means when I get there.

You know that box.

Maybe you have never been formally received either. Maybe you moved too often, or the moment never came, or something happened that made it impossible at the time and then the time passed. Maybe you have half planned to sort it out for thirty years.

There is no failure in this and nobody is at fault. Lives get complicated in ordinary ways and the ordinary complications are why most of these things never happen.

The register that is actually kept

Here is a sentence He said to seventy people who had just come back from doing extraordinary things, and He redirects them in one line.

Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.Luke 10:20

Your names are written in heaven.

Written. Past tense, done, in a register kept somewhere else. And notice what He is contrasting it with: the most impressive spiritual credentials anybody in that period could have produced.

He says do not rejoice in the achievements. Rejoice in the entry.

You are written in a register that is kept somewhere no clerk can reach. That is what Luke 10:20 says plainly, names written in heaven, in the perfect tense (Luke 10:20), and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the seal and the earnest of an inheritance, which is a mark set on a person by God and filed by Him, not by a parish.

And nothing here says go and get received

Let me be plain, because a woman of seventy nine has had enough people with suggestions.

Nothing here tells you to go and get formally received somewhere before it is too late. Nothing here says you should have done it at forty, and nothing here says you should do it now, and nothing on this site adjudicates what any community holds about any of that, in any direction.

If you wanted to, that would be entirely yours and it might be lovely. It is not a debt and it is not a deficiency being pointed out.

You are not being handed a task at seventy nine, and nothing about the end of your life needs tidying before it is allowed to be good. The word says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who applies that to a real woman with a real pen, and He has not been waiting sixty years for you to file something.

What sixty years of that was

Here is what is worth saying about the sixty years, and it is not a consolation.

You have sat with the dying. That is not a small sentence and I am not going to hurry past it. You have driven people to hospitals and you have cooked for families in the week after a funeral and you have cleaned a building nobody was watching you clean.

None of that was done from a position. There was no office and no title and no card, and it turns out that none of those were required for any of it, which is worth noticing, because it means the work was never running on the paperwork.

You have been serving out of something that no register ever issued, and the absence of a card did not stop one hour of it. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister (Hebrews 6:10), and read the last three words, present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in every one of those sixty years including the ones where you were on nobody's list.