The Evidence I Used to Bring

The good coat hangs on the second hook, where it has hung for fourteen months.

Navy. Proper lining. The one she wore for weddings and funerals and every single Sunday of a life, and it still smells faintly of the cupboard and of the perfume she stopped wearing about the same time.

She had a line, once. She used the line in conversation for years, always the same way, always slightly turned so it did not sound like boasting and always meaning exactly what boasting means. I have not missed a Sunday, she would say, since the year we moved into this house. And then a small laugh, and then whoever it was would say something admiring, and she would wave it off, and she would carry the admiring bit home with her and keep it.

That was the evidence. She would not have called it that. If you had said the word to her she would have corrected you briskly and quoted you something about grace, because she is not a stupid woman and she knows the doctrine as well as the minister does. But when she stood in front of God, in the quiet, and something in her went looking for the thing that made her standing there all right, it was never the doctrine that came up. It was the record. Eleven o'clock, second row from the back, every week, in that coat.

Then her husband had the stroke.

Nothing dramatic in how it changed things. Just arithmetic. He cannot be left. The service is at ten. The carer comes at two on a Thursday and not on a Sunday, and the church is very kind about it and a woman brings her a printed sheet on Tuesdays, and the arithmetic is the arithmetic.

Fourteen months.

And this particular Sunday morning, out of nothing but habit, she takes the coat off the hook and puts it on.

Stands in the narrow hall with it buttoned, in a house where the only thing happening at ten o'clock is the sound of the television in the other room.

Then she puts her hands in the pockets, the way you do, and finds a folded order of service from a Harvest two autumns back, gone soft at the crease.

And standing there in her hall in a coat with nowhere to go, she notices something that has been true for over a year and that she has never once said to herself in words.

She cannot remember the last time she talked to God without apologizing first.

Every prayer now opens the same way. Sorry. I know. I would if I could. As though she is late, and He is waiting by a door with a list, and the fourteen months are being counted against her by somebody.

What she used to bring to the door

Every one of us brings something. That is not a fault in her, it is a habit in all of us, and I would rather name it kindly than pretend it is rare.

Some people bring how they have been feeling about God lately. Some bring how much of the Bible they got through this year. Some bring the fact that they have never done the big obvious things, and some bring the fact that they did and have been sorry ever since. She brought a coat and a second row from the back and an unbroken run of Sundays. And the terrible thing about good evidence is that it works, right up until the day the arithmetic takes it off you.

Because look at what has happened. The evidence went, and her sense of being welcome went out of the door wearing it. Nothing changed in heaven. Nothing at all changed in heaven. Something changed in a hallway.

You have not been demoted in the fourteen months. Jude 24 says God is able to keep you from falling and to present you faultless before His glory, and you are the object of both verbs in that sentence and never once the subject, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping that true over you in a house where nothing happens at ten o'clock.

The verse where somebody else does the presenting

Read it slowly. It is one sentence and it is the whole answer.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.Jude 24

He is able to keep you. The keeping is His, not a matter of keeping yourself in attendance. And then, the part I want you to sit with: to present you faultless.

She has spent a lifetime doing her own presenting. Turning up in a good coat, in a good row, with a good record, presenting herself weekly at a door she believed she was allowed through on the strength of having come. And Jude takes that job out of her hands entirely and gives it to somebody else. Somebody who is able. Somebody who does it faultless, which is a word she would never have dared use of that record even in its best year.

And read the last three words, because everybody hurries past them. With exceeding joy. Not with a sigh. Not with an audit. There is delight in the presenting, and the delight is His, and it is not measuring the gap since the last Sunday.

You are held by the One who does the presenting, right now, in a hall, in a coat, with nowhere to go. Scripture put that keeping on His side of the page, and the Holy Spirit is the One making it more than a nice sentence at the end of a short letter.

The apology at the front of every prayer

Now, the sorry.

I want to be gentle here, because that apology is not rebellion. It is love with nowhere to put itself. She misses it. She misses the singing and the second row and the smell of the hall and the woman who always squeezed her arm on the way out, and the apology is what the missing turned into when it had nowhere else to go.

But hear what it is doing. It puts her in the doorway of her own house asking permission to come in, from a God who swore an oath and has never once revised it, and it does that at the top of every conversation before a single real word gets said.

You were never on probation. His word says He is able to keep you and present you faultless, and neither clause has a clause underneath it about attendance, and the Spirit who lives in you did not take fourteen months off.

And let me say the other half once, warmly, and then leave it alone: none of this makes the gathering optional or the years unimportant. Those Sundays fed her and God is not indifferent to them; when the arithmetic changes she will be glad to be back in that row. What has been settled here is His faithfulness, not a license for anybody to stop caring. Those are two different things and only one of them was ever in doubt.