Waiting For Permission

She was number eighty four, and the display had been on sixty one for forty minutes.

Ana had brought the folder. She always brings the folder. It has plastic sleeves now, and the sleeves are in order, and there is a paperclip on the two documents that go together because last time the man behind the glass had to ask for the second one and she was not going to give anybody that opportunity again.

This was her third visit. The first time it was the wrong form entirely, which was fair. The second time it was the right form without a stamp from a different department in a different building that closes at one. Today she has the stamp. She has held the folder against her chest on two buses to get here with the stamp.

And somewhere around number seventy she noticed something about herself that she did not like at all. She had gotten comfortable. Not happy, comfortable. She knew where the good seats were, near the window, away from the door that lets the cold in. She knew the rhythm of the display. She had, without ever agreeing to it, become a person who belongs to the queue rather than a person waiting to leave it.

You have been in that room, and yours has no plastic chairs in it.

Because there is something you have been waiting to hear, and you have been waiting a long time. You wanted somebody with authority to say it plainly about you. A minister, maybe, who would look at you at the end of a service and say the words in a way you could keep. A counselor. A person from your childhood church who has known you since you were nine. Or not a person at all: a feeling, a moment, a week where it all suddenly went quiet and certain, and you would finally know that you are actually in this, rather than standing near it with a folder.

And nobody has said it. That is the plain fact of your life. Not because anyone refused you. Nobody was ever appointed to say it, and so you have kept your papers in order and your seat near the window and you have gotten so used to the room that if somebody called your number tomorrow you might not stand up straight away.

You are not far off. That is what makes it ache. You are near enough to the door to hear what is happening on the other side of it.

The man in the tree, and who spoke first

There is a town called Jericho and an afternoon with too many people in the street.

A small man called Zacchaeus wants to see what everybody is looking at, and he cannot, and rather than push he does something undignified for a man of his position: he runs ahead of the crowd and climbs a sycamore tree by the road. Now he is up in the branches with his feet dangling, watching, not participating. Near enough to hear. Not close enough to be anybody's business.

There is nobody in that town who would have cleared him. He is the man who takes the money for the occupying power. He is on the wrong list of every household in Jericho, and every single person in that street would have told you exactly what he is.

Then the whole crowd stops under the tree, and the one they have all come to see looks up.

He says his name. And then He says: come down, hurry up, today I am staying at your house.

Watch the order of that, because the order is everything. Zacchaeus does not come down and make a case. He is not asked to explain himself first, or to demonstrate anything to anybody in that street. The Host speaks first, uses his name, and invites Himself to the table, and the man is coming down out of the branches before the crowd has finished being appalled.

You are dealing with a God who speaks first. You have been waiting on a human voice to tell you what His voice has already said out loud in the street, and I am not softening anything: John 6:37 is where He puts it in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the One reading it over you while you sit there with the folder on your knees.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.John 6:37

In no wise cast out. Not one. Not on a bad day, not without the second stamp, not the ones who came up the road late and out of breath.

There is no clerk on that door

Here is the thing about that room.

A queue exists because somebody has to check something. That is not cruelty, it is administration, and it is how every human institution has to work. But an oath is not an institution. When one party swears something, the door belongs to the one who swore it, and there is nobody standing at it with a list, because a doorkeeper would need authority over the oath in order to turn anybody back, and nobody has that.

So the sentence you have been waiting for a minister to say about you is a sentence no minister was ever given to say. Not because they do not care. Because it is not theirs. The only voice with standing on that door has already spoken, in public, in writing, and He said He turns nobody away who comes.

You have been holding your papers in order for a desk that does not exist. The word is already given and His Spirit is the One pressing it on you now, so the thing you have been waiting for is not coming, for the simple reason that it came.