The Introduction That Would Not Come

The urn in the corner of the hall had been switched on since six, and by twenty past seven the coffee tasted like the inside of a thermos. It had tasted that way for years and nobody had ever asked for it to be fixed.

On the folding table by the door there was a sheet of blank name badges, a green marker with a cracked cap, and a hand lettered sign that said WELCOME, PLEASE HELP YOURSELF.

Renata stood in front of that table with the marker in her hand.

Twenty years. Twenty years of walking into rooms like this one, and every one of them had opened the same way: the badge, the marker, her first name, and then the two words. Two words she had written so many times that her hand knew them without her. Two words that told a room in half a second where she stood, what she read, who she prayed with, and what she would and would not argue about once the tea came out. Those two words had introduced her at a summer camp in the rain. They had introduced her at a hospital chaplaincy induction, at a funeral tea in a village she had never been to before, and at a table in a stranger's back garden with the sausages burning.

She wrote her first name. The pen made the small squeak it always made.

Then nothing.

She stood there with the cap off and the ink drying and the two words simply would not come out of her hand. Not because she had stopped believing them. Somewhere in the last eighteen months the words themselves had stopped meaning to a room what they meant to her, and she could not put them down in green ink on a sticky badge and have them read as anything other than a position she was no longer certain she was standing in.

Behind her, somebody shook out an umbrella. The radiator under the window ticked twice.

She peeled the badge off the sheet with her first name alone on it, pressed it flat against her cardigan, and went and sat in the third row from the back with her coat still on.

The evening happened. She sang, and she meant it. She prayed under her breath during the long prayer and she meant that too. When the man at the front read from the Psalms her eyes went hot and she had to look at the carpet until it passed.

Afterwards, at the door, somebody lovely and about twenty-four put a hand on her arm and said, "I do not think we have met. What are you?"

Renata heard herself say, "I am Renata."

Then she said nothing else. The young woman smiled and moved on, and Renata drove home in the rain with the wipers on the intermittent setting and one sentence going round in her chest like a bird shut in a room.

I still believe all of it. I have nothing to call myself.

What the badge was actually for

Those two words were never the faith. They were the shortcut. A label compresses a long conversation down into the space of a sticky badge, and for twenty years hers did honest work: it told a room in half a second where she stood so the evening could get on with being about God instead of being about her. There is nothing cheap in that. People built those words out of things they suffered for, and every time she wrote them she was standing in a long line of people who had loved something enough to give it a name.

So hear me before we go one step further, because this is the part that gets skipped. You are not standing in a smaller place tonight than the place you were standing in last year. Scripture does not locate a person by their vocabulary. Psalm 139 opens with a man saying that the Lord has searched him and known him, and there is not one syllable in that psalm about what he called himself. The Holy Spirit breathed that line out long before your two words existed, and it is the same Spirit reading it over you at this hour.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me.Psalm 139:1

Searched. Known. Both of those verbs were happening at the folding table with the cap off the marker, and she did not feel a thing. That is how His knowing works. It does not wait at the door for an introduction. He was never informed about her by the badge on her cardigan, and He is not confused now that half of it is blank.

Here is what I want in your hands tonight, and I want it in there tight. You have not been un-known. The knowing never ran through the word, so the word going does not take the knowing with it. That is not my opinion and it is not a kindness I am inventing for you. It is what is written, and the Spirit who breathed that line into a psalm three thousand years old did not leave it on the page; He brought it into a car with the wipers going on the intermittent setting.

Think about how young the vocabulary actually is. Every word anybody has ever worn on a badge was coined by somebody, in a century, in an argument, in a language, for a reason. The thing all of those words were pointing at is older than the whole shelf of them. There were men and women carrying this faith in their bodies before a single one of those words existed to carry it in, and nobody has ever suggested they were carrying less of it.

So when the ink dried and nothing came, nothing holy was lost. You are held by a Person and not by a phrase, and that was just as true on every one of the days you were writing the phrase. His word says in 2 Timothy 2:19 that the Lord knoweth them that are his, and the Holy Spirit is not standing by waiting on your wording to make that stick.

Something in you wanted to give that young woman the whole history. Twenty years of it, so she would know exactly where to file you and could relax. That instinct is not vanity. It is the ordinary human wish to be placed, and God made us for belonging, which is precisely why the blank half of the badge stings the way it does.

But look at the mercy in it. You were placed long before you opened your mouth in that doorway. He set you in a family and He did not do it through a badge, and the Holy Spirit who bore witness inside your chest during the long prayer was doing the placing while the girl was still smiling and moving on. That is what is written, and that is what was happening in the room.

Nobody here is going to ask you what happened to the old word. That is between you and God, and it is not the price of admission to anything. And nobody here is going to hand you a new word to write in green ink either, because a fresh label pressed down onto a raw place is a bandage with somebody else's name on it.

What is left is smaller, and it carries more weight than the badge ever did. You have the thing itself. Not the description of the thing. The thing: God, knowing and known, and a heart in you that still goes hot when the Psalms are read out loud. Romans 8 says the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, and notice what He bears witness to. Not your affiliation. You.