Real and Far Away

The window seat has a cushion on it that came out of her mother's front room, and on a gray Saturday morning that is where she is, with both hands round a mug that went cold about twenty minutes ago and a view of the road going up the hill.

On the sill, propped against the glass, there is a card.

She wrote it three weeks ago. It has a wren on the front. Inside it says eleven words and then her name, and the eleven words took her most of an afternoon and two spoiled cards in the recycling. It is addressed to a woman she used to walk with on Tuesdays for four years, and it has not been posted, and every morning she moves it half an inch so it catches the light better and does not put it in her bag.

The thing itself was tiny. That is the part she cannot get anybody to understand, so she has never tried. It was nine words she said on a wet pavement outside the chemist in February, at the end of a walk, when she was tired and the other woman had said something about her son. Nine words. Nobody shouted. They finished the walk. And on the Tuesday after that, and every Tuesday since, she has taken the long way round by the allotments so she does not go past the house, and it has been eight months, and the wren card sits on the sill.

She prays every day. She has prayed every day for twenty years and she means it, and she is not a woman with doubts. She prays for the war on the news, for her son's contract, for the church roof, for the young family who moved into the corner house. She prays with her eyes open, looking at the road.

She has never once prayed about the card.

Not out of shame exactly, and not because she thinks He would mind. Because there is a proportion to things. God is enormous and holy and entirely real, and He is running the actual universe, and a woman of fifty eight does not take nine words spoken on a wet pavement to the throne of heaven. You get the big ones out and you deal with the rest yourself. That is not unbelief. In her mind it is manners.

So He is real, and He is far away, and both have been true her whole adult life, and she has never noticed that the second one is doing all the damage.

You know that card. Maybe yours is not a card. Maybe it is a room you have not gone back into, or a name you cannot say out loud in your own kitchen, or a five minute conversation you have owed somebody since a specific afternoon. You have never doubted for a second that God is there. You have simply never believed He comes down as far as this, because the whole thing is too small, too specific and too embarrassing to be a subject anybody in heaven attends to.

A redeemer needs two things, and only one of them is willingness

In the old law there is a person called the redeemer, the one who comes and gets back what has gone out of the family, and the whole institution turns on one requirement that people skip past because it sounds like paperwork.

He has to be near of kin.

Not sympathetic. Not powerful. Near. The right to act in your business belonged to the one inside the family and to nobody else, however willing, however capable. A stranger with every good intention in the world had no standing, and standing was the whole thing. That is why a woman looking at a card on a sill can be surrounded by kind people and still be alone with it: kindness is not the same as the right to walk into a matter and act.

And that is the exact shape of your problem. You do not doubt that God is willing. What you doubt, quietly, without ever putting it in a sentence, is whether He is close enough to your ordinary Tuesday to have any business in it.

Since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity, so that by His death He might break the power of him who holds the power of death.Hebrews 2:14

Read what that verse is actually doing, because it is not a poem about the incarnation. It is a legal move. The children have flesh and blood, so He took flesh and blood. He acquired the kinship. He did it deliberately, in order to be qualified, so that when He acted He would be acting as one of the family and not as a benefactor at a distance.

You have a Redeemer who took flesh and blood in order to have the right to act in your business. That is not my warm thought about God. Scripture says it in Hebrews 2:14 in the language of qualification, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a first century argument about kinship and lays it down on a windowsill on a gray Saturday.

He did not send help. Sending is what you do when you are far away and intend to stay there. He came into the family, permanently, and He has not left it since.

You are inside the circle where He has standing, and you were brought there rather than admitted on approval. It is written that He is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, and the same Spirit who makes a person cry out to God as Father is the one making that sentence about you and not about somebody more suitable.

Small is not a category He recognizes

Now the second half of your problem, and it is the half you have never said out loud.

You have decided which of your matters are big enough to be brought. You decide it every morning, and the criteria are entirely yours: a war qualifies, a contract qualifies, a roof qualifies, and nine words on a wet pavement do not. It feels like humility. It is actually a ruling you have been handing down about what He is allowed to be near.

And He is nearer than your ruling. The One who took flesh and blood spent thirty three years inside exactly this scale of life. He got tired at a well in the middle of the day. He asked who touched Him in a crowd over a woman who was hoping nobody would notice, and He would not let it be small, and He stopped the whole procession to make her say it out loud, and then He called her daughter. That is a person who does not sort His attention by size.

You are not too specific to be attended to, and the smallness of the thing was never the obstacle. His word says He was made like them in every way so that He could be a merciful and faithful high priest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that arrive as nearness rather than as theology.

I want to be plain about one thing, because this site is honest about it in every article. Being brought inside the family does not delete the February pavement. The record stands. Those nine words were said, and God does not pretend a life away, and if He did you could never trust anything else He said about it. What changes is the verdict. The record of what happened stays exactly as it is, and what it now means about who you are and whose you are has been settled by somebody with the right to settle it.

You are standing on a changed verdict, and the history under it has not been edited to make the verdict possible. Scripture never once says the past was undone, it says you were redeemed, and the Spirit is the one who keeps you from confusing the two on the mornings your memory tries.