I Have No Role At All

She arrives about four minutes late, which is not accidental and which she has never explained to anybody.

If you arrive on time you get talked to. If you arrive four minutes late you slide into the back and nobody has to decide whether to come over.

And she leaves before the coffee, which is the more significant of the two.

Six years.

She has never taken anything on. Not a rotation, not a group, not the thing where you say you might come along to something on a Wednesday. She has been asked twice, both times gently, and both times she said something noncommittal and both times the person accepted it graciously and did not ask again.

She is not avoiding people. That is the strange part, and it is why she has never been able to explain it. She likes those people. She thinks about several of them during the week.

But she has no attachment to anything in that building, no thread running from her to any part of it, and after six years she has drawn the conclusion that seems obvious from the outside, which is that a person like her is not really what the word member is for.

She goes. She listens properly, which is more than can be said for some. She is affected by it, sometimes considerably, and then she is in her car by twenty past.

What is not going to happen here

Let me say it plainly first, because the whole architecture of your six years is about not being cornered.

Nothing here is going to suggest you stay for coffee, take something on, or come along to a Wednesday. There is no soft invitation at the bottom of this page and there is not going to be one.

And nothing here is going to tell you what you are for.

And nothing here is going to ask you for anything at all beyond one small thing with your hands, which you can do sitting in the back four rows from anybody.

You are not going to be drawn into anything here, and nothing on this page makes attachment the proof of your place. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a sentence about something happening on the inside, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a woman to stay for coffee before He would deal with her.

The witness is on the inside

Here is the sentence, and where it happens is the whole thing.

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.Romans 8:16

With our spirit.

Not to a congregation. Not through a rotation. Not by way of anything visible or recordable or attendable.

The witness is a transaction between the Spirit of God and the spirit of a person, conducted somewhere that no register reaches and no membership list can see and no observer can verify, including you.

And notice the content of the witness: that we are the children of God. Not that we are welcome. Not that we are doing well. Children, which is a status word and not a participation word.

You are being borne witness to on the inside by the Spirit Himself, in a place where six years of leaving at twenty past has no jurisdiction at all. I am not stretching that. Romans 8:16 places the witness between His Spirit and ours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman in her car with the engine running.

Abba is not a word you say in a meeting

Read the verse before it, because it is even more specific.

Ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.

Whereby we cry. That is the language of an unguarded moment. Abba is not liturgical. It is the word a child uses without thinking about it, and Paul says it is the Spirit of adoption that produces it in a person.

Which is worth sitting with for somebody who is in the back four minutes late and out by twenty past.

That word does not require a room. It does not require anybody to have seen you. Most of the times a person cries Abba, in the sense Paul means, there is nobody there at all.

You have been carrying an adoption that produces its own evidence in private and needs no witnesses at all. That is Romans 8:15 in its own terms, and the Spirit who searches all things has been with you in that back row and in that car for six years and has been bearing witness the entire time.

Coming and going is not a status

Now the plain thing, and it is the correction.

You have taken an accurate observation about your behavior and turned it into a category about your standing.

The observation is right. You come and go. You have no thread running to anything. That is an entirely fair description of six years.

The category is not right, because the word member in Scripture is not a participation word. It is an anatomical one. Paul means a hand, a foot, an ear. A member is a part of a body, and a part of a body is not more a part when it is being used.

A hand in a pocket is a hand. A hand asleep is a hand. There is no state of a hand in which it stops being a member of a body, and there is no mechanism for it, and Paul chose that image over any of the available institutional ones on purpose.

You have been reading a description of your behavior as a statement about your status, and the word member in that letter is anatomy rather than participation. That is 1 Corinthians 12 in its own image, and the Spirit who bears witness with our spirit is not keeping a record of your Sundays and cross-referencing it.