The Form With No Advocate

The ticket in Deirdre's hand said forty-seven. The screen on the wall said thirty-one.

Gray plastic chairs bolted in a row to a steel rail, so that when anybody shifted, four people felt it. A water cooler with no cups left. Strip lighting that made everyone look like they had been up all night, which several of them had.

She had come early. Her documents were in a plastic wallet from the pound shop, in date order, with a page of notes in her own handwriting in case her mind went blank, which it did in rooms like this.

What she had not planned for was the chairs.

Two along from her, an old man with a flat cap on his knee sat beside his daughter, who had his paperwork on her lap and kept patting the back of his hand without looking at him, the way you do when you have done it a thousand times. Across the aisle, a young woman with a support worker beside her in a lanyard, and the support worker knew the caseworker's first name and had a folder of her own. By the door, a man in a good coat, and beside him somebody with a leather case who was clearly going to do all the talking.

Thirty-eight. Forty-one. Forty-four.

And Deirdre understood, sitting there with her wallet of papers squared on her knees, that the thing making her heart go was not the decision. She had a case. Her case was good. She had checked it four times at the kitchen table.

It was that when they called forty-seven, one person was going to stand up.

Just her. Her, and a plastic folder, and whatever she could remember to say in the eleven minutes they gave you.

That is a particular kind of alone, and it does not only happen in waiting rooms. It happens in a car park before a conversation. In a corridor outside a room where a decision is being made about your child. On the phone at half past four with a number that has been transferred twice. Everybody else seems to arrive with somebody.

You have gone in on your own for so long that you have stopped noticing you do it. So before your number comes up, look at the chair beside you, because there is something about it you have not been told.

The day a king's son took his coat off

There was a shepherd, the youngest of eight, who had walked in off a hillside smelling of sheep and had nothing behind him at all: no family standing, no rank, no weapons of his own worth the name.

And there was a prince. The king's son. Next in line, in a country where that meant everything, wearing what a king's son wore so that a room knew him before he opened his mouth.

They cut a covenant. And then the prince did something with his hands that everybody in that court would have understood instantly.

Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.1 Samuel 18:3

Look at what actually came off. The robe, which was his standing, the thing that told a room whose house he belonged to. The sword and the bow, which were his ability to answer for himself. The belt, which held the whole lot together. He handed the shepherd everything that made him formidable, and he did it in public, and he did it as part of an oath.

You have somebody's standing on you and it did not come off a hillside with you, which is why walking in alone has never actually been an accurate description of what you were doing. I am not dressing that up. 1 Samuel 18:3 has a prince taking his own robe off his back and putting it on a man with nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the One pressing that ancient handover onto a row of gray chairs in a building the writer never saw.

What a covenant does to a room

Two people in covenant pooled everything they had. My strength is your strength. My house is your house. If one of us is in it, the other is already in it, and anybody with a case against one has a case against both.

That is the whole weight behind a question Paul asks, and it is worth noticing that he asks it rather than announcing it.

If God be for us, who can be against us?Romans 8:31

It is a question because it wants an answer, and the room cannot produce one. Nobody in that building, and nobody in yours, can finish that sentence.

Right now, as you read, the arithmetic of who stands where in your matter is already settled, and it was settled without consulting the queue. Romans 8:31 does not say the room is friendly. It asks who is on which side, and the Spirit is the One turning that from a sentence you have heard into a fact you can feel in your shoulders.

What this does not say, and it matters

It does not name a person as your enemy. The clerk behind the glass is doing a job on a Tuesday. The relative on the other side of the disagreement is somebody God loves and has not stopped loving. Covenant backing was never permission to make an opponent out of a human being, and the moment it becomes that, it has stopped being what Paul is talking about.

And it does not tell you how the decision goes. Nobody honest can promise you an outcome, and this article is not going to try. What changes is not what happens next. What changes is who is standing in front of it.

You are not the one carrying this any more, and that is a change of fact rather than a change of feeling. Scripture puts the robe on the shepherd before the shepherd has done anything to deserve wearing it, and His Spirit is the One who keeps a person steady in a queue that has not moved for forty minutes.