Not Half Of Me

Two rooms, eleven days apart, and the same feeling in the same place under her ribs.

The first one is a Friday evening. Candles, her grandmother's candlesticks, the ones with the dent in the base from the move in 1961. Her cousin's husband is being funny, and he is a nice man, and he is not trying to wound anybody. He says something light about her other Sundays. It is a joke about a book, really. Everyone laughs, including her, and it is fine, and she carries the plates out to the kitchen and stands there for slightly too long with her hands on the edge of the sink.

The second one is a Tuesday. Somebody she likes and trusts, in a church foyer with a hot drink, being kind, being genuinely kind, asks her a question with the whole weight of the room behind it.

So when do you think you'll settle on one?

He does not mean it cruelly. He means it the way you would ask somebody when they are going to sort out their filing. He thinks he is asking about tidiness. He is asking her which of her grandmothers to put down.

She says something about it being complicated and he nods and the conversation moves to parking.

And she drives home, and here is what she cannot explain to anyone, in either room: she is not confused. That is what everybody assumes and it is not true. She knows exactly what she believes. She could tell you in three sentences and never contradict herself once.

She is just tired of arriving everywhere with something under her coat.

In one room she is too much of one thing. In the other room she is too much of the other. And in both rooms the people are decent and mean well and are not villains in this story, and that is precisely why she has never once said any of this out loud.

She has learned to shave a bit off before she goes in. A word she does not use here. A part of the week she does not mention there. It is very small each time. It is like paying a coin at two different doors, and she has been paying it for eleven years, and the strange thing is that nobody has ever asked her for it. She just knew.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you know exactly which coat you put on for which room. You know the half sentence you swallow at your mother's table and the different half sentence you swallow at church.

And you have started to wonder, quietly, whether the tiredness means something is wrong with you. It does not. You are not confused, you are not sitting on a fence, and you are not being difficult.

You are being asked, gently and constantly, by people who love you, to amputate something. And you have been doing it in small slices so that nobody has to see it happen.

Somebody already took the wall down

Paul is writing to people who lived exactly this. Two groups, one room, and a great deal of tension nobody was pretending about. And when he gets to the heart of it he does not propose a compromise, or a policy, or a settlement where each side gives up something.

He says a Person did it, and He did it in Himself.

For He Himself is our peace, who has made both groups one and has broken down the middle wall of partition, the hostility.Ephesians 2:14

You are held by somebody who took a wall down rather than asking anybody to climb over it, and He is not confused about what you are. That is what the verse says He did, made both one and broke down the middle wall (Ephesians 2:14), and it is the Holy Spirit through whom both have access unto the Father (Ephesians 2:18), which is one door for two kinds of people and not a door with a form at it.

Read the first three words again. He Himself.

Not a council. Not an agreement they reached after a difficult meeting. Not one group finally conceding. The peace is not a treaty between two parties, it is a Person, and the wall came down inside Him.

And now look at what actually happened to the two groups, because this is where people misread it and it costs them.

They were made one. It does not say either of them was erased. It does not say the two became a third thing that had no memory. The word Paul uses for one is the plain number one, and he keeps calling them both by their names right through the letter afterwards, which he would not do if the point had been that they should stop existing.

What was demolished was not the people. It was the wall.

The wall in that city was a real thing you could go and look at, a barrier in a temple courtyard with a warning carved into it about how far certain people were allowed to walk. And there was a version of that wall in every room those believers went into afterwards, and the thing Paul insists on is that the demolition already happened. It is done. Nobody has to negotiate it.

So here is what I am not going to do, and I want you to know it is deliberate.

I am not going to tell you which room to sit in. Not the Friday one, not the Sunday one, not both, not neither. That is not mine to hand you and it would be an insult dressed as help. I am not going to tell you what to keep or what to stop, or settle any question of practice for you, or tell you that one of your grandmothers had it right. This message will not do that to you and neither will this house.

And I am not going to tell you that the people in either room were wrong to have made you feel it. Most of them do not know they did. Some of them were carrying an old bruise of their own and did not recognize it in their mouth. Your cousin's husband is a nice man. The one with the hot drink in the foyer meant it kindly. You are allowed to love them and to be tired at the same time.

There is only one thing being said to you here.

The wall you have been keeping in yourself, the one you use to decide which half to leave in the car, is already rubble. Christ knocked it down Himself, in His own body, before you were ever asked to choose. You have been carefully maintaining a partition that has no foundation under it and no builder standing behind it.

You are one person. You have always been one person. The two rooms are the ones with the problem, and even they will not always have it.