New Again At Sixty

He moved for his daughter, which is the right reason, and he would do it again, and that is not in question.

What he did not fully understand at the time, and what nobody tells you, is what it costs to leave a place where you have been known for thirty-one years.

In that other church he did not have to explain anything. People knew about his wife. They knew what he did before he retired and they knew what happened in the fourth year of his marriage and they knew, without ever discussing it, which Sundays were going to be hard for him and they simply stood nearer.

Thirty-one years of that.

He has been at the new one eighteen months. Everybody is friendly. It is a good church and he would say so.

He is a pleasant stranger there. That is the exact phrase he used in his own head about six weeks ago and it has stuck.

People are glad to see him. Two or three know his name reliably. Somebody asked him a question about his life last month and he found himself giving the short version, the one you give at a wedding, because the long one takes about four years of Sundays to deliver and he is sixty-one and it is not obvious that he has four years of Sundays to spend on it.

And what he thinks, standing in the parking area on a bright morning with everybody talking in twos and threes, is that a man does not become part of a place twice.

What is not going to happen here

Let me put it plainly, because you have had enough of things being made easier for you.

Nothing here is going to suggest you join something, sign up for anything, or make an effort to get involved. There is no invitation at the bottom of this page. That would be a page telling you that belonging is a project you have not started, which is the thing that is wearing on you.

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.

You are not going to be handed a strategy for fitting in, and nothing here makes usefulness or effort the proof of anything. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in an image about masonry, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to be known by a room before He would deal with him.

A stone does not build itself in

Here is the sentence, and the grammar of it is doing the work.

Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.1 Peter 2:5

Are built up.

Passive. The stone is not the one doing the building. A stone does not work its way into a wall, does not integrate, does not put in the years. It is placed, by somebody else, and once it is placed it is part of the structure, and the structure holds it whether or not the stone has any sense of the matter.

And notice: lively stones. Living ones. He is not describing something inert being stacked. He is describing living people being set into a structure by a builder.

Which lands on a man in a parking area in a particular way, because everything about the last eighteen months has felt like a project you are performing badly.

You are being built into a house by somebody else's hands rather than working your way into one, and the verb in that sentence is not yours. I am not stretching that. 1 Peter 2:5 puts the building in the passive and the builder is not the stone, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man standing in the sun after a service.

Thirty-one years was not the mechanism either

Now the thing that follows, and it is the part that changes the arithmetic.

You are reading the thirty-one years as what made you part of that other place. Time, and shared history, and people knowing about the fourth year of your marriage.

That was real and it was good and losing it is a genuine loss and I am not minimizing it.

But it was not what made you part of the body. It was what made you known in a congregation, which is a different and lovely thing that takes time and cannot be hurried and which you may or may not get again.

Being part of the house was never built by you in either place. You were set into it once, by a builder, a long time before you had thirty-one years anywhere.

You are standing on something you never constructed in that other church over three decades, and the thing that gave you a place there is the thing you carried two hundred miles in the truck. The word puts the building in the builder's hands, and the Spirit who searches all things came with you and did not stay behind with the people who knew about the fourth year.

And being unknown is not being outside

One more thing, because I think it is what is actually sitting on you.

Being unknown is hard. It is genuinely hard and it is harder at sixty than at thirty and nobody says that out loud enough.

But unknown and outside are two different conditions and you have been treating them as one.

A stone set into a wall is not known by the other stones. That is not how masonry works. It is held by the mortar and by the builder and by the structure, and its position does not depend on the recognition of the ones next to it.

You may be a pleasant stranger in that room for another four years. That is possible and it would be a real sorrow. It would not be a statement about whether you are in the house.

You are set in the house whether or not anybody in that room knows about the fourth year of your marriage, and being unknown has never once been the same thing as being outside. That is 1 Peter 2:5 with the holding done by the builder, and the Spirit who bears witness has been in that parking area every Sunday for eighteen months.