When The Mess Is Cleared Up

The garage door is up and the afternoon is that low gold that makes everything look better than it is.

There are three zones in there and everybody who has ever done this knows all three. There is the good zone, near the back, which took a whole Saturday in April and has stayed done. There is the middle, which is where things go when a decision about them is postponed. And there is the pile by the door, four boxes deep, which is the pile you have promised yourself you would sort out before anybody came round.

You have been at this for three years.

It is not laziness. There is a box in the middle of that stack with your mother's handwriting on the lid and you have opened it twice and closed it twice. There is a bag of a child's clothes that the child grew out of a long time ago. There is a folder from a job that ended badly and a set of golf clubs belonging to a friendship that faded.

Everybody who offers to help gets the same answer, cheerfully, every time. Not yet. Give me a fortnight. Let me get on top of it first.

And the strange thing, the thing you would not say to anybody, is that you talk to God the same way.

Not deliberately. You have just quietly filed the whole of this in the middle zone, the postponed pile, under the same heading. When work settles down. When that conversation with your brother is had. When the drinking is properly sorted, or the temper, or the thing you do at two in the morning with your phone. When the garage is done. Then you will take it personally. Right now you are attending, and you are grateful, and you keep it about six feet away from yourself because it would be embarrassing to claim something while the boxes are still by the door.

Now stand in a field with me.

End of a long march. Thousands of people in tents, everything they own in two bundles per family, and not one of them has planted anything, built anything or cleared a stone off anything. The country in front of them is somebody else's fields, somebody else's walls, somebody else's wells.

And a man stands up and starts reading out portions. Family by family. This valley to you. This ridge and the slope under it to you. The terraces on the far side of the water to you.

Watch what he is not doing. He is not assessing anybody. He is not sorting the households into ready and not ready. There are families in that camp who buried people on the way, families with a mess behind them that everybody in the camp knows about, and every single one of them hears their own name and a piece of ground read out in the same voice as everybody else.

They walk to their portions carrying two bundles and a great deal of unfinished business. It is theirs on the day it is read, and the clearing of it takes the rest of their lives.

The portion was assigned before anybody cleared a field

The order of that afternoon in the camp is the thing to hold onto, because we have it backwards and it is costing us years.

Nobody was given a portion because they had proved they could work it. The giving came first. The working came after, and the working was long and real and full of setbacks, and none of it was ever the qualification. A family standing in a tent with two bundles owned a valley they had not seen because a portion had been assigned to them, out loud, in front of everybody.

That is the shape of everything God does in covenant, and it is the exact opposite of the way you have been running your garage.

So take this where you actually live, because it is already yours and not on offer pending inspection. You are not waiting outside this until your life is presentable. Colossians 1:12 says the Father has made us fit to share in the portion of the saints in light, and it says it in the past tense, and the Holy Spirit is the One putting that finished sentence up against the pile by your door.

Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.Colossians 1:12

Read the verb. Hath made. Not is making, not will make when the middle zone is dealt with. The fitting was done, by the Father, and it was His work rather than yours from the first day.

Postponing is not humility

Let me name what has been happening, gently, because I doubt anybody has ever put it to you plainly.

The postponing feels like respect. It feels like the decent thing, the opposite of presumption, nothing at all like the man who claims things loudly and lives however he likes. There is something genuinely good in that instinct and I am not going to take it off you.

But look at what it actually does. It puts the qualifying back in your hands. It makes the fitness of a person the product of a tidy garage, and it means that on any given evening the reason you are keeping God at six feet is a stack of boxes and a folder from a bad job.

That is a heavy load to put on a man, and God never put it there. So take it off tonight, because this belongs to you already. You have been made fit by the Father and not by your progress, and the word for that in Scripture is grace, and His Spirit is in this garage right now making a past-tense verb into something you can stand on.

There are terms and I will say them straight, because a covenant without terms is a sentiment. God's part is the portion, the fitting and the oath underneath both, all finished. Your part is to take it personally: to step in, to walk to your portion carrying whatever you are still carrying, and to work the ground for the rest of your life. That is a real yes and it will cost you. It is simply not what makes you fit.