The Lane You Are Already In

The family came off the plane in a long straggle, six of them, still carrying the cake tin somebody had insisted on bringing home from the wedding. Down the corridor, round the turn, and the hall opens up and splits into lanes, and everybody knows where they are going, and everybody goes.

Except her. She stops. She always stops. She stands with the burgundy passport in both hands and looks up at the overhead signs and reads them the whole way across, left to right, and reads them again, before she moves.

Her grandson comes back for her. He is nine. He takes her wrist the way children take a wrist, with total authority, and says, "Nan. It's this one." Then the machine looks at the page and looks at her face and the doors part, and she goes through braced, the way a person goes through a door they half expect to shut.

Thirty years she has held that document. Thirty years she has checked.

And you do the same thing, only not at an airport. You have believed since you were small. You know every song. You have carried the tea urn and the toddler group and the funeral of a woman nobody else visited, and if somebody asked you tonight to say the words I am a child of God about yourself, out loud, in a plain sentence, you would find something to tidy.

You can say it about anybody in your church. It is a lovely thing to say about them. It has simply never once come to rest on you.

The thing that has never once landed

Let me say the weight out loud first, because it does not get said and it deserves to.

There is a particular loneliness in being useful to God for forty years and never once thinking of yourself as belonging to Him. It is not doubt. You would defend every article of it in a room full of people who did not believe a word. It is that the whole arrangement sits in the third person. He is good, His people are loved, His children are safe, and somebody else is always the subject of those sentences while you carry the chairs.

Nobody teaches that. It just settles, like dust on the top of a door frame, in the years when a person is too busy serving to sit down.

When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.Galatians 4:4 and 5

Look at what Paul makes the deciding factor there. Not a temperament. Not a warm hour in a meeting. A date. God moved at a moment of His own choosing and did something legal and finished on the other side of the world from your feelings about it.

So hear this over the corridor you are standing in. You are looking at a position that was granted rather than generated, and Galatians 4:7 uses the flattest possible language for it: no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. It is written in the courtroom voice on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who carries that flat sentence past your defenses into the place where you actually live.

Paul puts them in an order, and it is not the order you assumed

Here is the verse people quote and misread, and reading it right undoes years of quiet exclusion in about ten seconds.

And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.Galatians 4:6

Because. Because you are. The status comes first in that sentence and the cry comes second, and the cry is not even yours to produce, because it is His Spirit doing the crying inside a person. You have the order in front of you now, and it does not begin with a feeling and it never asked you for one. The written word puts the placement first and the affection second, and the Holy Spirit is the one closing that gap at a speed He chooses.

Which means the flatness you have felt about all this was never the disqualification you took it for. A document does not stop being a document on a day you cannot feel it. The gate at the airport does not read her confidence. It reads the page.

Nobody in that hall is checking your service record

The other thing that keeps a lifelong worker standing in the corridor is a suspicion that the place is being held on approval, and that it is being reviewed somewhere by somebody who has the rota.

But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.John 1:12

He gave the right. That is a grant, and a grant is made by the one who owns the house. You were never the one who arranged this and you were never asked to fund it. The word says God sent His Son at the fullness of time, and He sent the Spirit afterwards as the witness, and both of those verbs belong to Him alone.

None of that is here to tell you what your standing is. It is not mine to pronounce and I would not dare. It is here to set the thing on the table in front of you in daylight, where you can look at it without anybody watching, and let God settle with you what He has already settled in Himself.