Waiting To Be Told I Am Allowed

He has worked out the timings to the minute in both places.

Ten minutes late, which is late enough that the greeting is over and nobody is at the door with a clipboard and a warm smile and a question. Five minutes before the end, which is early enough that he is on the pavement before the part where people turn round and start talking to each other. He has been doing it for four years. He is extremely good at it.

He does not think of himself as hiding. He would tell you he is just not a joiner, and that he does not like small talk, and both of those things are a bit true, in the way that a reason is a bit true when it is standing in front of the actual reason.

The actual reason is that he is waiting.

He is waiting for somebody, in either room, to say a specific sentence to him. He could write it out for you. He has written it out for himself, at various times, and it changes slightly but the shape is always the same, and it always amounts to: you are allowed to be here, and we are not going to ask you to be less of the other thing to do it.

Nobody has ever said it. Not because anybody has been cruel. Most of the people in both rooms have been kind to him and several of them have gone out of their way. It is just that the sentence he needs is not a sentence people say out loud, and it certainly is not a sentence anybody says to a man who is always leaving.

So he has arranged his life around a permission that has never arrived, and here is the cost of it, which he does not see: he has been in both rooms for four years and has never once been in either of them.

If you know that pavement, this is for you.

And I am not going to promise you that anybody in either room is going to say the sentence. That is not in my gift and it would be a lie, and you have been lied to enough about this by people who were only trying to be encouraging.

Something better than that is available, and it has been sitting in a letter for two thousand years.

Where your standing was actually issued

In the beginning, every single believer was Jewish, and the great and painful question of the age was whether anybody else could come in at all.

Read that again, because it is worth feeling the strangeness of it. The whole argument ran the other way. The question that split rooms and filled letters and required a council was whether the outsiders could be let in without becoming something else first.

And then the centuries turned the question over, completely, until it was pointing the other way round, and the person standing in the middle became the one who had to explain themselves. Nobody sat down and planned that. It happened the way large slow things happen, and there are no villains in this paragraph and I am not going to invent any.

But the letter that was written while the question was still live is still there, and it says something about your standing that neither room issued and neither room can revoke.

So then you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.Ephesians 2, verse 19

You are a fellowcitizen already, and the paperwork was completed by somebody with the authority to complete it. That is what the verse states outright, no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints (Ephesians 2:19), and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the earnest of that inheritance, a deposit put down in advance on something already settled.

Two words in that sentence are doing enormous work, and they are both legal.

Fellow citizens. Not guests. Not visitors with a long term arrangement. Citizens, with the same standing as everybody else who holds it, which is the whole point of the word, because a citizen who has to prove it every time is not one.

And members of the household. That is warmer and it is even stronger. A household is not a building you are permitted to enter. It is people you belong to. You do not stand in the doorway of a household you are a member of, waiting to be recognized, and nobody in a family issues you a pass at the door.

And a few lines earlier the same letter says the thing that settles it: He Himself is our peace, who made both one and broke down the wall between them.

Not a treaty between two rooms. A person. The peace is not an arrangement that the rooms have to ratify before it becomes real for you. It is Christ Himself, and He did it, and it is done, and He is not standing in either doorway waiting to see what anybody decides about you.

Which means the sentence you have been waiting four years to hear has already been said. It was just said somewhere neither room can reach, by somebody neither room can overrule, and it does not require countersigning.