The Speech Between the Clothespins

It is a good drying day and she is out early with the basket on her hip, because wind like this does not wait for anybody.

Sheet first, doubled over the line, four pegs. Then the shirts by the shoulders the way her mother did it, then the towels, then the small things last so they are hidden behind everything else.

And while her hands are doing that, her mouth is doing the other thing. It always does. She has an apology worked out for God and she has been working on it for a long while now, and the line is where she practices it.

The first sentence is good. She has had it for ages and it says what she means. The second one follows on well enough. It is honest and it does not make excuses.

The third one is where it comes apart. Every single time. It is the one where she has to say what happened, and there is no clean way to say what happened, and every version she tries either sounds like she is asking for a medal or asking for a pardon, and she is not asking for either. So she goes back to the first sentence and starts again with a peg in her teeth.

The basket empties. The line fills up and starts to lift and crack in the wind. The shirts are all leaning the same way.

She carries the empty basket back in and puts it under the sink, and the whole speech goes back where it lives, unsaid, for another day.

You are the one with the pegs. You have the apology, and you have had it a long while, and it has never once been said out loud, because you cannot get the middle of it right and you would not turn up with a broken speech.

The speech is honest work and it was never the gate

I want to say something kind about that speech before we go anywhere near putting it down, because plenty of people would call it hypocrisy and they would be wrong.

That speech is not a performance. It is the shape your seriousness has taken. None of it is avoidance; it is an attempt to arrive properly, the way a person would not turn up at somebody's door with empty hands. It is careful, and the care in it is real.

But look at what it has actually done. It has become the thing between you and the door. The third sentence has been holding the whole conversation up for a long time now, and it will keep holding it up, because there is no wording that makes a distance sound tidy.

You are not required to be articulate before you are received, and the sentence that will not come right is not the condition of anything. Scripture never once puts a person's welcome downstream of their explanation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you rehearsing rather than let the thing die out of you altogether. He was not waiting for the wording. He was keeping you facing the house.

He was already running

Now the verse, and read the order of it, because the order is everything.

But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

A great way off. The father saw him at that distance, which tells you the father was looking, and had been. Then he ran, and men of his standing in that country did not run anywhere. He picked up his robes in front of the whole village and ran down the road, and the boy had not said one word yet.

Then read what happens to the speech. The son starts it. He gets out the part about heaven and the part about not being worthy, and the next thing in the passage is the father talking to the servants about a robe and a ring, straight over the top of him. The prepared line about being made a hired servant never lands anywhere at all.

You have a Father who is already running toward you while your speech is still in your mouth, and the running started before the words did. That is Luke 15 as it stands and not my softening of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been holding this in front of you all morning. The welcome does not arrive after the explanation. It arrives during, and it interrupts.

The last mile was never yours to earn

Here is what the running does to the geography, and it is worth sitting with.

The son planned to walk the whole way home under his own steam and to negotiate his position at the gate. He never got to. The father covered the last stretch himself, at a run, in front of everybody, so that the boy's arrival happened in his father's arms rather than at his father's door.

That is what has been quietly wrong with the speech. It assumes there is a last mile you have to make good on. There is not. There is a distance, and it is real, and the One at the other end of it is not standing still.

You are being met, not audited, and the ground between you and God is being covered from His end while you stand there with a peg in your hand. His word says the father ran, and the Holy Spirit is the one making an old story land on a person in a back yard on a windy morning. Nothing about that welcome is conditional on you getting the middle of it right.

So the speech can be set down. Not because it was wrong to write it. Because it was never the price, and the wind is good today, and He is already halfway down the road.