Every Line of It True

The hall has had the heating on since eight and it smells of coffee and floor polish.

She is third to speak. Two minutes, the daughter said on the phone, and just say what he was like on shift, because nobody in the family ever saw that part of him.

So she stands up in front of eighty people, most of them in the coats they came in, and she says he covered nights for eleven years and never once made anybody feel slow. She says he could get a frightened man back to sleep with about four words. She says he taught her how to sit with somebody without filling the silence.

And then she says the other part, because it would be strange not to. She says that he is not lost. She says that the Lord he talked about on those long corridors is the Lord he is with now, and that whatever else is true about today, death did not get the last word about him.

She means every syllable of it. She would say it again tomorrow, in front of anyone, and defend it if she had to.

Afterwards, in the queue for the tea, his nephew shakes her hand for a long time and says something about how good it must be to have her faith to lean on at a time like this.

Yes, she says. Thank you. It is true, and it is kind of him, and she means that too.

It is later, at the sink at the back of the hall with her sleeves pushed up and forty cups to do, that the whole thing arrives at once. Everything she said out there is true. She has never doubted a line of it. And not one line of it has been anywhere near her for a very long time. She has been carrying it the way you carry a folded letter in a coat pocket: real, hers, unread since the day it went in.

You are the one at the sink. You could stand up and say it in front of eighty people, and every word would be true, and the trueness is not the problem. The problem is that true and near stopped being the same thing somewhere, and you cannot work out when, and you have started to wonder what it says about you that you can still say it so well.

Martha said the right thing and meant it

There is a woman in John 11 who does exactly what you did at that funeral.

Her brother is four days dead, the house is full of people, and Jesus arrives late. She goes out to meet Him on the road and says the first honest thing in her mouth, and then, when He tells her that her brother will rise again, she answers with textbook doctrine, and it is correct.

I know, she says. I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.

Every word of that is true. She is not confused, she is not wavering, she is not putting on a brave face over an empty place. She has the doctrine straight and she means it. What she has, and she does not know she has it, is a true thing filed a long way off. The last day. Somewhere out at the end of everything, correct and enormous and nowhere near this road on this afternoon.

Watch what He does with that, because it is not the thing anybody braces for.

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.John 11:25

He does not correct her content. He does not tell her the belief was never real. He takes the whole of it and moves it about a thousand miles, from the last day to the six feet of road between His face and hers, and He says it in the present tense: I am. Not I will be, at the end. I am, here, now, in front of you, while your eyes are still swollen.

You are being brought near tonight, and the nearness is His doing and not the reward for believing harder. That is not my warmth talking. It is written in John 11, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been closing that distance under everything, which is why a sink full of cups turned into this instead of into nothing.

Intact and near are two different things, and neither one accuses the other

Here is the fear underneath the sink, and I want to name it plainly so it stops working in the dark.

The suspicion that started somewhere in there is that being able to say it well is evidence against a person. That a faith which can stand up in a hall and be word perfect while living this far off must be a performance, or a habit, or something inherited and never actually owned. So the very thing that used to be a comfort has quietly turned into an accusation, and now the nephew's thank you cannot be taken without something inside flinching.

Jesus does not go anywhere near that with Martha. Not one syllable of it. He never suggests her belief is a costume, never asks her whether she really means it, never uses her correct answer to prove she was far away. He simply moves what she believes into the present tense in front of her face and asks her one question about it. Believest thou this. And she says yes. And that is the end of the interrogation, because that is the whole of the interrogation.

You have a faith that is genuinely yours, and the distance has no authority to call it fake. I am not inventing that over you. John 11 shows Christ leaving a woman's belief entirely alone and moving Himself closer instead, and His Spirit is doing precisely that in you now, in a hall, over a tray of cups.

He came the rest of the way Himself

Notice who does the traveling in that story.

Martha does not close the gap. She does not go away and work on her convictions and come back when they feel warmer. She stands on the road with exactly the belief she already had, and He walks the distance, and then He walks to the tomb, and then He weeps, which is not the behavior of somebody keeping His distance until people improve.

That is the pattern, and it is the only pattern in this. The nearness is His work. Not a project you undertake with better mornings, not something built back up over months to earn the right to feel it again. He comes. That is what He is like, and it is written all over the chapter.

So there is nothing to construct before you speak. No warm up, no reading plan finished first, no proof that you mean it more than you did at the front of that room.

You have the standing to say something true about yourself out loud tonight, and it is standing given to you in Christ rather than rebuilt by you over the years it went quiet. That is what the written word says about anybody in Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence like that, which is a distance He has already crossed from the other side.