The Late Arrival

He was thirty four when it happened and he is fifty one now, and he still stands slightly back from the group at the end of things.

Seventeen years. He teaches a class. He has led more people to this than most of the men who grew up in it. If you asked anybody in that building whether he belonged there they would look at you strangely, because of course he does, he is one of the reasons half of them are still coming.

And he knows a particular thing about himself that he has told nobody, and it is this.

In every room he has ever been in, he is doing arithmetic. He is working out what everybody else in the room got that he did not get. The songs they knew as children. The names they can say without checking. The thing that happens to a person when a verse has been in them since they were six.

He came in with nothing. No family in it, no upbringing, no childhood version, no grandmother who prayed. At thirty four, out of a completely ordinary life, alone, and everything he has he built after that date.

And the picture he cannot get rid of is a family reunion. A big one, in a garden, going all afternoon, and he arrives at half past six when the food is finished and the photographs have been taken and everybody is extremely kind to him.

Extremely kind. That is the part.

You know this feeling if you have it, and there is no need to explain it to you.

Maybe you came at nineteen, or fifty, or last year. Maybe you can date it to a week. Maybe you have never once said out loud that you feel like a guest in something you have given your whole adult life to, because it would sound ungrateful, and you are not ungrateful, you are the opposite of ungrateful, that is precisely why you have never said it.

Nobody did this to you. There is no villain in it. It is simply what a person carries when they know the exact date they walked in.

What was being said in that room

There is a sermon in Acts preached to a room of people, and one sentence in it is doing something almost nobody notices.

And we declare unto you glad tidings, how that the promise which was made unto the fathers, God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children.Acts 13:32-33

Read the tenses in that sentence, because they are the whole thing.

The promise was made. Long ago, to people who were dead before anybody in that room was born. And it has been fulfilled. Now, to the people standing there listening.

Which means that for the entire stretch in between, for centuries, while nobody in that room existed, God was keeping something in their direction. The promise was not made when they showed up. It was traveling toward them the whole time, through generations who never saw it land, and it arrived at people who had done nothing to start it.

You are not the beginning of your own story, and something was being kept toward you for centuries before you knew there was anything to know. That is what the sentence says when it puts made in the past and fulfilled in the present (Acts 13:32-33), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a tense in an old sermon and makes it land on a man of fifty one who still stands at the back.

Now sit with what that does to a date.

You have a date. Thirty four, or nineteen, or last April. That date is when you found out. It is not when you were thought of, and it is not when the arrangement was made, and the two things are not remotely the same.

The reunion was never the picture

The reunion picture is wrong, and it is worth taking apart carefully rather than just being told to cheer up.

At a reunion, the good part is the shared past. The people who have it are the insiders and the people who do not are guests, and the guest is welcome and the guest is not the point of the afternoon. If that is the shape of the thing you have joined, then you are permanently and correctly at the back, and no amount of kindness fixes it, and this is exactly why kindness has never fixed it for you.

But look at what the older half of the book keeps doing with its promises. They are almost never handed to somebody who has the right past. They are handed to somebody who is stopped in the middle of an ordinary life and told to go.

Abraham was seventy five and from somewhere else. Ruth was a foreigner with a dead husband and no standing whatsoever. Rahab had no religious past that anybody would have wanted printed. Not one of these is a person with a childhood in it.

You have arrived exactly the way most of the people in this book arrived, which is from outside and in the middle of a life. Scripture says of Abraham that he went out, not knowing whither he went (Hebrews 11:8), and it is the same Spirit who has been moving on people from outside since the first page of it.

And now hold both of those at once, because this site will never let you drop either one.

The family is real. It has a history and a beginning and it did not start with you, and that is not a bar you failed to clear. You have been brought into something ancient, and being brought in is how everybody gets in. The word says ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ (Ephesians 2:13), and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the bringing, which is why nobody in any room got there by having the right grandmother.