Three Words On A Card

The away-day finished early enough to walk home along the canal, and the light was doing that low gold thing it does in September, and there were four of them strung out along the towpath arguing amiably about whether the ducks belonged to anybody.

Her friend is delighted. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly delighted. She keeps taking her card out of her sleeve and looking at it again and saying that it is exactly right, that her husband will laugh, that she has always thought that about herself but never had the words. And she is not being silly. It has landed on her, and it has given her something, and that is a good thing that happened to a good person today.

The other woman has her card in her coat pocket. She has not taken it out since the room.

Because here is what happened in the room. She filled the thing in honestly. She thought about it. She did not tick what she wished were true. And at the end she got three words back, and somebody read them out warmly, and everybody made the small approving noise a room makes, and she looked at those three words and waited for something to rise in her.

Nothing rose.

Not disagreement. That would have been easier. The words were not wrong. They were just words, sitting there on a card, and she felt about them roughly what you would feel reading somebody else's parking permit.

And now she is walking along a canal in beautiful light next to a friend she loves, agreeing warmly, saying yes that sounds like you, and underneath it there is a small cold thought she would be ashamed to say out loud: everybody else got something today and I got a card.

Maybe you have that card. Yours might not be laminated. It might be the result of something you did years ago, or a thing somebody once said about you that you have been carrying as though it were an identity document. And the trouble is not the card. The trouble is what you were hoping it would do, which was to tell you what you are for, in a sentence, at last.

What a soil test cannot tell you

A soil test is a genuinely useful thing. You take a sample from your ground, you send it away, and back comes a sheet with numbers on it. Acidity. Nitrogen. Clay against sand. All of it accurate. Nobody who works land laughs at a soil test, and the people who ran that exercise today were not doing anything foolish either. They were trying to give you something helpful, and for your friend on the towpath it was.

But a soil test has never once told anybody what will grow.

The old woman who has worked that same ground for decades knows things the sheet does not contain. She knows where the frost sits until eleven in the morning. She knows which corner floods in February and dries out first in June, and that the plum did nothing for years and then went mad, and why the far bed took and the near one never has. None of that fits on a sheet. It is not that the sheet lied. It is that knowing ground is a different kind of thing from measuring it, and only one of them takes years.

Paul, writing to a church that was extremely pleased with how much it knew, put the whole business the other way round in one short line.

But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.1 Corinthians 8:3

Read what he does not say. He does not say: if anyone loves God, he will understand himself. He does not offer better information. He turns the sentence over, and the knowing goes the other direction, and the reader is on the receiving end of it rather than the working end.

So let this be said over you, and let it be Scripture that says it. You are known by God tonight, and not identified, not categorized, not summarized in three words that a room could nod at. Known, in the way ground is known by somebody who has worked it in every weather, and His Spirit is the one who takes that short line out of an old letter and lays it on a woman walking home along a canal.

Now I want to name what actually stung today, because it was not the card.

It was that a question has been riding along with you for a long time, and it is not really what am I good at. It is: is there anything in me. And you went to a Saturday hoping quietly that a piece of paper might answer it, and when the paper came back it could not, because paper cannot, and the disappointment you felt was not about the exercise at all. It was the question sitting back down again.

I am not going to hand you a better card. There is no better card, and if I gave you three warmer words tonight you would be back here in a year with the same ache and a nicer piece of paper. What I can tell you is that the question has an answer and it has never once been in your keeping.

God knows what He put in you. He did it Himself and He did not need a form to remind Him, and He has never at any point been waiting to find out. Scripture says the members were arranged in the body exactly as He chose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did the distributing, so there is not a version of this where He is unclear about you and you are supposed to work it out and report back.

And what do you do with that on a towpath in September?

You say it. Out loud, in your own voice, which is the appointed way and always was. Jesus set the amount of faith required so small that the men listening tried to talk Him up from it, and the thing He would not shift on was that the mountain gets spoken to rather than carried home (Matthew 17:20). A cold thought you would be ashamed to say out loud is a mountain. It has been in you since the room and it has never once been answered above a whisper.

You have every right to answer it out loud tonight. Not because of anything the card said, but because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture puts the authority of the words in His finished work rather than in your self-knowledge. His Spirit is what carries a spoken sentence out of a person and into the actual evening air.