He Has Known You The Whole Time

She said it to a customer at the till, and it was out of her mouth before she heard it.

Something about the flowers, and Easter, and the woman being in a rush, and then: oh, I used to be quite involved with all that, years ago.

Used to be.

She scanned the rest of the shop, said have a lovely day, and did not think about it again for six hours.

At twenty past two she sat in her car in the far corner of the car park with a sandwich she was not eating and worked out what had happened, and the arithmetic of it took her breath.

She had prayed that morning. In that car. In that space, third from the trolley bay, at ten to six, with both hands on the wheel and the heater going and the shutters not up yet.

She had prayed for her son. She had prayed for the woman on nights whose husband is ill. She had said thank You for the light coming up over the roof of the recycling bins, because it does that in September and it is genuinely beautiful and nobody else is there to see it.

Eight hours before she told a stranger she used to be involved in all that, she had been talking to God with her forehead nearly on the steering wheel.

Three years of that. Not a week missed. Not one.

There is a Bible in the glovebox under the ice scraper. It is soft at the corners now. She has never once thought of herself as somebody who reads it.

And you will want to know what happened three years ago. It is hers, and it stays hers, and whatever happened in yours is not the same and this page will not pretend to know it. Some people were hurt. Some people got tired. Some moved towns and never found anywhere. Some had an argument they lost, or won, and could not stay after either way. Some just stopped one Sunday and never worked out why.

What is the same is the sentence.

I used to be.

Said by somebody who prayed forty minutes ago.

You know this car. Maybe yours is a bus stop, or a fire escape, or the eleven minutes after everyone has gone to bed. Maybe you talk to God constantly and describe yourself, out loud, to actual people, in the past tense, and you have never once noticed the gap between the two.

Whose knowing it rests on

Here is the thing I want to hand you, and I want to be careful with it, because it is easy to turn into an argument and it is not an argument.

Nothing on this page will tell you to go back.

And nothing on this page will tell you to stay out. This site does not know your three years. It does not know what was said, or who said it, or what it cost you, and anybody who rules on that from a distance is playing with something that belongs to your actual life. You will work that out with God, in your own time, and it is not this page's business.

What this page can do is show you the thing that was never resting on the ruling in the first place.

The solid foundation of God stands firm, bearing this seal: the Lord knows those who are His.2 Timothy 2:19

Read where the seal is.

It is on the foundation. It is not on you, and it is not on a list, and it is not on a register that somebody keeps in a cupboard and updates when you stop coming. A seal is the stamp pressed into the wax, the mark that says whose this is and that it has not been opened by anybody else. And the wax here is God's own foundation, which is to say the thing He laid, which is to say the thing nobody can take up.

Then read what the seal says. It does not say, those who are His know it. It does not say, those who are His can prove it, or feel it, or name what they are when a customer asks about the flowers.

The Lord knows those who are His.

The knowing is His. It is His act, in His direction, and your belonging is a fact about God rather than a fact about your paperwork.

And now hear where that sentence comes from, because it was not written into calm weather. Paul reached back for it to the day the whole camp was in an uproar about who legitimately belonged, when the question of who was really God's and who only appeared to be had blown the community apart. That is when God said it. Not when everyone was in their seats. When the whole arrangement was in pieces and no one could tell who was in.

That is the day this sentence is for. It always was.

So the arithmetic in your car does not work the way you have been doing it.

You have been counting rooms. Three years of rooms not entered, and the total comes out at somebody who used to. God has been counting nothing, because He is not running a total. He has been knowing you, present tense, continuously, at ten to six, third from the trolley bay, with the heater going. And that is not my arithmetic either. It is what 2 Timothy 2:19 says out loud, and the Holy Spirit set that sentence down in the middle of the uproar, and the same Spirit is in the car with you while you do the sums.

One more thing, and then I will stop, because you can take this too far in the other direction, and I will not help you do that.

You were not made to be the only person in the room. God has never once thought that was good, and He has not stopped arranging otherwise, and if something in you aches for a table with other people at it then that ache is not weakness and it is not disloyalty to whatever happened. It is the shape He made you.

But He is not waiting on it in order to know you. He knows you now, out here, exactly as you are. That is not my hope for you. It is what stands written on the foundation, and it is His Spirit holding it there, and never the room you are or are not sitting in.