The Box You Left Blank

The form runs to four pages and she does three of them in eleven minutes, because she is good at forms.

Name. Date of birth. Next of kin, and she writes her sister's mobile from memory. Allergies, none. The pen is a free one from the bank and it skips halfway down page two, so she scribbles a small circle in the margin to get it going again. Behind her the kettle is coming up to the boil for the second time, because she boiled it once already and forgot about it, which is the sort of Tuesday this is.

Then page four, near the bottom, a box the size of a postage stamp. Religion or belief. And under it, smaller, in brackets: faith community, if any.

She stops.

Not for a second. For a long, strange, ten seconds, with the nib resting on the paper, making a small blue dot that will spread if she does not move. Because the true answer takes too long and will not fit in a stamp. The true answer is: I love God. I have loved Him since I was nineteen. I pray in the car and I pray at the sink and I read four chapters most mornings before anyone else is awake. And I have not been through a church door in two years and three months, and there is no word for that, and there is certainly no box for it.

So she leaves it empty and folds the form in three. The kettle clicks off behind her for the second time. And she stands in her own kitchen at twenty to five with an ache she would not say out loud to anybody: she has just been asked what she is, officially, on paper, and she had no answer to give.

You know that box.

Maybe yours was a form and maybe it was a cousin at a wedding asking so where do you go now, and then the pause afterwards. That half second held four possible sentences and none of them was the true one. The pause became practiced. So did saying something light and moving the conversation on.

The pause costs you something every time, though. And I think you could tell me exactly what it costs.

What God keeps instead of a register

Let me say the heavy thing first, because it has been carried politely for a long time and I do not think anybody has named it out loud in front of you.

It is not a building being grieved. That would have had words by now. What has actually gone missing is smaller than that and worse than that: a word for yourself. For years one answer came whole when a stranger asked. Now love for God may be more private and more honest than it has been in a long time, while the sentence still will not finish.

And there is a thought that turns up around three in the afternoon on a slow day, and it is the one that does the real damage. It is not I miss it. The thought is: does He also not know what to call me now.

Read this slowly. It was written by a man to a younger friend at a moment when the people around them were scattering and names were being counted in and counted out.

Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.2 Timothy 2:19

You are known by God, and you were known long before any form went looking for a category to put you in. That is not a comfort I am improvising at your kitchen table tonight. It is the sentence Paul wrote to a man watching people fall away around him, and the Holy Spirit has brought you to it at this hour on purpose. Paper asks for a label. God speaks a name.

Now look at what God is said to keep.

Not a register. A register is a list of who turned up, and it has never once been the thing that made anybody His. A seal is something else entirely. A seal goes on the thing itself. It is pressed in, it says whose this is, and it does not fall off when the thing is carried into a different room.

And look at the verb. Knows. Not counts. Not files. Not reviews. Knows, which is the warmest word in that whole sentence and the one almost everybody reads straight past.

Notice when it was written, too. Not in a settled season. It was written into a mess, to somebody watching people fall away and wondering what was left standing, and the answer he was given was that the foundation of God stands sure and the Lord knows the ones who are His. If that was true then, it is true now. He has not since started fastening His knowledge of you to your movements.

So here is the second thing, and it is not for a category or file. It is for you.

He calls His own by name. That is John's Gospel, and it is the detail that undoes me every time. Not by number. Not by group. By name. And long before that, through Isaiah, He says to His people, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine. Your name. The one at the top of page one, in your own handwriting, written out before anything on that form got complicated.

You have a belonging that was settled long before page four got round to asking. He calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. By name, and notice that the calling comes before the leading, every time, in that order. The Holy Spirit carries that call into this kitchen with the biro still in your hand. The form arrived late to a truth that was already sealed.

One more thing, gently, and then we will do something with your hands. Nobody here is asking where the last years were spent, why, how long, or what comes next. That is not what this is and it is not our business. The prayer today, or the prayer the crowded day interrupted, belongs to a believer. The thing wobbling was vocabulary, not faith. A person who has lost the word for a thing has not lost the thing.

You are a believing believer while the old vocabulary is still unavailable to you. The Lord knoweth them that are his. The knowing is His, done from His side, and it was never assembled out of your ability to describe it on request. The Holy Spirit bears a witness that runs deeper than a pause over a box. A missing answer has never once made faith go missing.