Every Belonging I Have Had Was Earned

Every place he has ever belonged has had terms, and he learned to find them early, and he is very good at it.

In the house he grew up in, belonging was conditional on being useful, and he was useful from about nine. At the first place he worked, belonging was conditional on never being the one who complained, and he never was. In the town he came to at twenty six, belonging was conditional on speaking well enough not to be a burden, and he worked at that for four years with a radio and a dictionary and got there.

He is forty three.

He is not damaged by any of this. He would find that word ridiculous. He would say, correctly, that a great many people have had far worse and that the terms in each of those places were reasonable and that he met them and that things went well.

Here is what he does now, without deciding to, in any room he is in for more than a month.

He looks for the terms.

Not anxiously. The way a good driver looks at mirrors. He works out what this place actually requires, quietly, over a few weeks, and then he does it, and he has never once been wrong about a room in twenty years.

He came to faith at thirty one.

And here is the sentence that came to him in the car after a Sunday in March, and that he has not been able to put down since: I do not know what the terms are here, and I have been waiting twelve years to find out.

Not because anybody has hidden them. Because there do not appear to be any, and a man who has never in his life been in a room without terms does not experience that as freedom. He experiences it as terms that have not been stated yet.

So he has been waiting. Twelve years of a low steady watchfulness, in the one place where it is not required, and it does not look like anything from outside, and nobody has the faintest idea.

You know the watching. Yours may come from somewhere else entirely. But you know what it is to have learned that belonging is conditional, and to have been unable to put down the search for the conditions in the one place there are none.

Nobody negotiated their own birth

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about grace in the abstract you will agree with it and nothing will change.

You already believe in grace. You could teach it. The pit is not doctrine.

The pit is that a habit twenty years old is running underneath a doctrine twelve years old, and the habit is faster and older and does not consult the doctrine, and so a man who genuinely believes he is accepted freely still enters every room, including that one, looking for what it will cost.

Here is the verse, and it is about a category of people and how they came to be in it.

Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:13

Look at the list of things it rules out.

Not of blood: not by family, not by who you came from, not by the house you were raised in.

Not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man: not by anybody's decision, effort, arrangement or negotiation. Not by yours and not by anybody else's.

But of God.

And the word underneath all of that is born, and a birth has a feature that this verse is leaning its whole weight on: nobody negotiated it.

There is not a person alive who agreed terms before being born. Nobody was consulted. There were no conditions, because a condition requires two parties who can discuss, and one of the parties did not exist yet.

Take that at the table, and know it is not my kindness, it is what is written. The terms you have been waiting for were never issued, because this was a birth and not an arrangement. John 1:13 rules out every mechanism a man could look for, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that birthing, and He does not open with a list of requirements.

And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The birth language in John is one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture as well as a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.

You are not inside terms you have not been shown, and you were never a party to a negotiation here. John 1:13 rules out blood and the will of the flesh and the will of man by name, and it is the Holy Spirit who did the birthing, and no conditions were attached to it anywhere.

I will not pronounce on where you stand; that is not mine to do and no page should try it. What I will say is what the verse says: this category was entered by birth, and birth has no terms in it anywhere.