Nobody In The Story Looks Like Me

It was the church hallway, and the pictures had been up so long that nobody saw them any more, and he stopped in front of one because his daughter had asked him a question in the car.

She was nine. She had asked whether the people in the Bible were from here.

He had said no, they were from a long way away, and she had said, oh, and that was the end of it, and he had thought about it the rest of the day.

So now he was standing in a hallway looking at a painting of a man with a beard and very fair skin and a robe, and the frame said it had been given in memory of somebody in 1974, and further along there was the same man again with children around him, and every one of the children was fair.

He is forty six. He has been in that building since he was a boy. He has never once in his life said out loud that nobody in any of those pictures looks like his grandmother.

And he wants to be careful here, because he is not angry, and that is what makes it hard to say. Nobody hung those paintings to keep anybody out. Somebody gave them in memory of a person they loved. That is a good and ordinary thing.

It is just that a boy grows up in a hallway, and the hallway teaches him something without ever saying it, and the thing it taught him is that this story happened to other people and he was kindly let in.

You know that hallway if you have walked it.

Maybe it is the pictures. Maybe it is that every name in the story is hard to say in your language, or that the people who taught you all came from one place, or that your own grandmother's faith gets called a version of it. Maybe you have never let yourself finish the thought.

Nobody did it on purpose. That is almost always true, and it does not make the hallway any shorter.

The founding sentence already had you in it

Here is a line from the older half of the book, spoken about a house that had not been rebuilt yet, and it is worth reading slowly because of one word.

Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.Isaiah 56:7

For all people. Not for one and then, later, reluctantly, for others.

And look who the verse is about. It is about the outsider, the person the sentence calls the stranger that joins himself to the LORD, and the promise is that they are brought to the mountain and made joyful, and that what they bring is accepted.

Accepted. Not tolerated. Not permitted as an exception.

You are not an exception that was made later, and the invitation to your people was written into this house before the house was rebuilt. That is what all people means in the founding sentence about that house (Isaiah 56:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who has been gathering from every language on earth ever since, which is not a policy that got changed at some meeting.

So the origin is specific. It started in one place, with one people, in one language, and this site will never pretend otherwise, because a beginning that could have been anywhere is not a beginning at all.

And the same specific beginning is the one that said all people out loud, from the start, in its own scriptures, before anybody like you was ever in the room to ask.

Two things that are both true

Hold these together, because a page like this usually drops one of them.

The story began there. Genuinely there. In a particular land, among a particular family, and the men and women in it looked like the people of that place and spoke that language and ate that food. Nothing about that is a problem to be solved or a detail to be smoothed away.

And the day the wind came and the whole thing went public, the very first thing that happened was that people heard it in their own languages, and the list of where they were from is written out in full, name after name, as if somebody knew it would matter.

You have a language and a place and a grandmother, and none of that is something you set down at the door. The word says every man heard them speak in his own tongue wherein he was born (Acts 2:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who did that on the first day, deliberately, which tells you what He thinks about a person's own tongue.

Nobody has been replaced in this. Nobody was pushed out to make room for you and nobody is being asked to move up the bench. That is not what the older half says and it is not what the newer half says, and this site does not run that argument in either direction, ever.

You have been brought in, and being brought in is not the same as being let in. Scripture says ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19), and His Spirit is the one who does the making of a citizen, which is why nobody's standing in this house rests on the paintings in a hallway.