Nothing Terrible Ever Happened

They set the chairs out in a horseshoe for the testimony evening, which was somebody's good idea, and it means there is nowhere at all to sit that is not facing everybody else.

There is a microphone on a stand in the gap, and nobody uses it, because the hall is small and everybody just stands where they are and talks.

She has a paper cup of orange squash and she is on the second row of the horseshoe with her coat still over her knees.

The first man to stand has been out of prison eleven years. He tells it in about ninety seconds, plain, no decoration, and there is a stillness in the hall afterwards that nobody breaks for a second or two.

Then a woman in her fifties who was drinking a bottle a day and is not any more, and who says the date the way people say a birthday.

Then a man whose marriage was in pieces on a Thursday and is not in pieces now, and who cries in the middle and keeps going, and his wife is sitting there holding his coat.

Then a girl of about nineteen who was in a car that went off the road.

It is going round the horseshoe. That is the thing. It is going round, in order, and she is doing arithmetic about how many people are between her and it, and her chest is going, and she is trying to find one thing.

There is nothing.

Nobody drank. Nobody left. Nothing came off the road. Her parents were ordinary and kind. She married a decent man and he is still decent. The children were healthy and remain so. She has had one operation and it went fine, and money has been tight twice and both times it stopped being tight.

Her turn arrives. She stands up because that is what you do, and she hears herself say: nothing much has ever really happened to me, I am sorry, and she sits down.

The next person starts, and the evening goes on, and her ears burn for a good ten minutes.

Afterwards there is tea, and she goes over to help with the cups because she would rather have her hands busy, and the woman at the urn is the one from the second story, the one with the date like a birthday.

They wash up for a minute without saying anything much.

Then the woman says, not looking up from the sink, quite quietly:

Do you know what I would have given for your testimony.

And she stands there with a tea towel in her hand and absolutely no idea what to do with that sentence.

What the room was accidentally teaching

I want to start by defending that hall, because I am not going to build anything on top of a cheap shot at people telling the truth.

Every story in that horseshoe was real and every one of them mattered and God was genuinely in the middle of all of it. Nobody was showing off. A man who has been out eleven years and can say so in ninety seconds is doing a brave thing in a small room, and the stillness afterwards was the right response.

But rooms teach things nobody says out loud, and that room, without meaning to, taught one lesson all evening: a testimony is what you get when something goes badly wrong and God turns up in it.

And if that is the definition, then a woman whose life has been quietly kept has nothing. She is staff. She is a helper at the urn while other people have the relationship.

That is the arithmetic she was doing on the second row, and it is wrong, and I want to take it apart properly rather than pat her on the arm.

You are not on the edge of anything, at this moment, reading this. Ephesians 2:19 says you are no more a stranger or a foreigner, and both of those words are about standing rather than about experience, and the Holy Spirit did not wait for you to have a dramatic year before He moved into you.

Therefore, which points backwards

Here is the verse, and the first word of it is the one to watch.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Therefore. That word does not look forward at what is coming. It points back at what has already been done, and Paul spends the whole first half of that chapter setting up what it points at, and none of it is anybody's biography.

He points at what God did in Christ. That is the entire ground of the counting in. Not the drama of the person's arrival, not the depth of the pit they were fetched out of, not the story they can tell at a supper. The counting happened at the point of Christ and it happened equally for everybody it happened to.

Then look at the two words he takes off you: strangers and foreigners.

A stranger is somebody nobody knows. A foreigner is subtler and it is the one that fits the woman at the urn. A foreigner can live in a country for forty years. Speak the language perfectly. Know the buses. Do all the work. And still, in some room at the back of the mind, be a guest, on a permit, one bad day away from being asked what she is doing here.

Paul says: not that. Fellowcitizen. Household.

Right now, as you read this, you hold the same standing in that house as the man who came out of prison eleven years ago, and it is the identical standing, not a lesser version of it issued to quiet lives. That is what the word says in Ephesians 2:19, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a written status feel like an address you actually live at.

The things you stopped counting

Now I want to go carefully, because there are two things I am not going to do to you.

I am not going to invent a dramatic story on your behalf and tell you that you had one really, if you look at it right. And I am not going to tell you that yours is coming, that God has something big planned, that your season is on the way. I have not been told that about you and neither has anybody else, and a page that hints at it is writing checks on a God who does not appreciate it.

Here is what is actually true, and it is better.

Your life is thick with things God did that you filed as normal. Not reframed disasters. Actual kept things. The road driven ten thousand times. The children who came through their teens. The night the pan caught and the tea towel was somewhere else. The two tight periods that stopped being tight. The friendship kept since school, which is statistically remarkable and which nobody in that house ever once called a mercy.

Look at Timothy. Paul writes to a young man who has no crisis account whatsoever: faith that lived first in his grandmother, then in his mother, then in him, and from a child he had known the scriptures. Nobody fetched Timothy out of anything. He was raised in it and kept in it and Paul hands him a whole church.

You were kept and it was not an accident and it was not because nothing was ever coming near you. His word calls that a household you belong to rather than a waiting room, and the Holy Spirit has been the keeping in it every ordinary year of your life.