They Talk About My Family In The Past Tense

It happens about four times a year and it never gets easier and he has never once said anything.

Someone at the front, or someone at a table, or someone in a small group with a study book open, will say a sentence in passing. It is always in passing. It is never the point of what they are saying.

They will say: back when they had the temple. Or: that was their part of it. Or the one that goes through him worst, which is simply the word then, used with a small full stop after it.

And then they carry on, because it was a subordinate clause, and nobody in the room noticed anything happen.

And he sits there being from that family.

He does not think anybody in that room means a thing by it. He has known some of these people for eleven years and they would give him their car. If he told them what those sentences do, they would be horrified, and several of them would cry, and one of them would want to talk about it for two hours in a way he does not have the energy for.

So he says nothing, and he goes home, and in the car he does what he always does, which is nothing at all, because there is nowhere to put it.

The room is not against him. That is what makes it so difficult. There is no enemy in this story. There is a shorthand, used gently, by people who love him, and the shorthand has a past tense in it, and he is sitting inside the past tense with his coat on his knees.

You know this if it is yours.

Maybe it is about your family and maybe it is about something else entirely. Maybe you have heard a whole category of people you belong to spoken about as a stage that history has moved past, in a warm room, by kind people, in a subordinate clause.

Nobody meant it. Compression does this. A long story told quickly needs one movement, and the movement it keeps is the one that goes forward, and everything the story has left behind ends up in the past tense whether or not it is actually in the past.

Two words with no past tense in them

Here is the end of that chapter, and I want you to read it for its grammar rather than for its argument.

As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers' sakes. For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.Romans 11:28-29

They are beloved. Present tense, and written by a man who was in the middle of the most difficult argument of his life about exactly this.

And then: the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. Which does not mean God is not sorry. It means He does not take back. It is a word about a decision that is not revisited, and it is stated as a general fact about how He operates rather than as a special exception being made.

You are held by a calling that has no past tense in it, and He is not in the habit of taking things back. That is what without repentance means in the sentence it was written in (Romans 11:29), and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the seal and the earnest of an inheritance in the same letters, which are both words for something set and not something under review.

Now, this page will not do the next thing, and I want to say that clearly.

What is not being decided here

Nothing on this page settles the argument that sentence sits inside. Not one clause of it. What the whole chapter finally means, and how the parts of it fit, has been argued by serious and faithful people for a very long time, in every direction, and I have opinions and they are not the point of a manna article and you did not come here for them.

I am not going to hand you a position to take back into that room. That would be worse than the shorthand, because a position turns a room into a debate and you would lose eleven years of friendships in a fortnight for a sentence.

What is here is smaller and it is for you rather than for the room.

Two words. They are. Present tense. That is what the text says, and you can carry that home in the car without having to correct a single person.

You have been handed a present tense, and you can hold it without needing to win anything with it. Scripture says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance (Romans 11:29), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a grammatical fact land in a man's chest rather than in his argument, which is the difference between comfort and ammunition.

The room does not know

Here is the part that will actually help you on a Sunday.

The people saying those sentences do not know they are saying them. That is not an excuse and I am not asking you to be gracious about it, because you have been gracious about it for eleven years without anybody asking and that is quite enough.

It is information. It tells you that what you have been absorbing was never aimed. Nothing in those rooms has ever been thrown at you. It has been dropped near you, by people carrying a summary they were handed, and it landed on your foot.

You have not been sitting in a room that despises you, and what has been hitting you was not thrown. The word says charity thinketh no evil (1 Corinthians 13:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible to know a thing hurt without concluding a thing was meant, which is one of the hardest pieces of work He does in anybody.

And you are not obliged to educate anybody. Not this month, not ever. If a day comes when you want to say something to one person over coffee, that is yours to choose. It is not a duty and it is not owed.