The Word At Its Original Size

Somebody at the table asks what you did at the weekend, and you give the shorter answer.

Not a lie. You went for a walk, you saw your sister, the boiler man came. All true. What you leave out is the part where you sat in a room with about forty people on Sunday morning and sang, and cried a bit during the second one, and stayed behind afterwards praying with a woman whose son has stopped speaking to her.

You leave it out because of a word. And the word is not even a word you would have to say out loud. It is the word that would arrive, unspoken, in the head of everybody at the table the second you said the true thing, and once it arrives it comes with about six other things attached to it that you have never held, never voted for, never defended and never wanted, and you would spend the rest of the lunch quietly trying to peel them off one at a time while the soup went cold.

So you say you saw your sister. Which is true. And you eat your lunch.

This is a small thing. You are not being persecuted and you know it, and you would be embarrassed if anybody described it that way. Nobody at that table was unkind and nobody was even thinking about you.

But something is being lost in it, and you have started to notice what.

You have stopped being able to say plainly what happened to you.

Because something did happen to you. There was a beginning. Maybe it was loud and maybe it was so quiet that you only recognized it afterwards, but there is a before and an after in your life and you know exactly where the seam runs. And the only short words anybody has ever given you for that seam are words that no longer arrive alone. They come in carrying luggage that belongs to other people, other arguments, other decades and other countries, and you have to unpack all of it before anybody can hear the one thing you were trying to say.

So you have gone quiet. Not about God. About the seam.

That is worth getting back, and getting it back does not require you to defend one single thing you never signed up for.

What it was when He said it

The word was not born in an argument. It was born at night, in a private conversation, between two men, one of whom was a respected teacher who had come after dark because he had questions and a reputation.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.John 3, verse 3

Look at how small the scene is. One room. One lamp. One man asking honestly and one man answering him.

There is no movement here. There is no bloc, no platform, no wing, no label, no side. There is a rabbi being told, gently, that what he needs is not more instruction but a beginning, and that the beginning is not something he can generate, because nobody has ever arranged their own birth.

That is the whole size of it.

Born from above. Not born harder. Not born correct. Not born into a set of positions that will need explaining at a work lunch in two thousand years. Given a start that came from outside you, the way your first one did, with about the same amount of input from you.

And the other word, the one that has had an even harder time of it, is simply the word for good news. That is all it has ever meant. It is what you shout in the street when the war is over. It is what a runner carries. It went into the language as news that is good, arriving from somewhere else, about something that has already happened rather than something you must now achieve.

Good news, and a beginning you did not manufacture. Those two things are the whole of it. Everything else that has ever attached itself to those words attached itself later and from outside, and none of it is in your hands to answer for.

Here is what that means for the lunch table.

You are not the custodian of everything the word has been made to carry. You never were. You were handed a small, enormous thing: news that is good, and a start you did not make, and permission to say so plainly. His Spirit is the one who put it in you and keeps it there.