The Speech She Kept Ironing

The board is up in the back room where it has been up for eleven days, and she is on the fortieth napkin.

Saturday is her granddaughter's wedding. Forty napkins, the long cloth for the top table, and her own blouse hanging on the door frame under a dry cleaner's bag she has already taken off twice to check it. The iron hisses when she stands it up. The window is open because of the heat and she can hear next door's boy practicing his scales, badly, with great commitment.

She irons the way her mother ironed, from the middle out, and her hands do it without her.

Which leaves her head free, and her head has one job in this room, and it has had it for a long time.

She is working on what she would say to God.

She has it in three parts, and she has revised it more times than she has pressed this cloth. There is an opening, which is good and which she is pleased with. There is a close, which is short and which she can say without her voice going. And there is a middle, where she has to explain, and the middle has never once come out right. Every version of it sounds like an excuse, even the honest ones, especially the honest ones, and she will not go to Him with an excuse in her mouth. So she presses it flatter and tries again.

The iron goes off at the wall. The napkins are in a stack with the fold facing the same way, because that is how you do it.

She has never said one word of any of it out loud.

She hangs the cloth over the back of the chair, and she stands there a second with her hand on it, and she thinks, next week. When it is worked out. When the middle holds.

You have that speech. Maybe not three parts, but you know where yours goes wrong, and you know you have not said it, and you have decided that saying it before it is ready would be worse than not saying it at all.

The speech is not the problem

You are safe here, and I want to say the kind thing first, because you have been braced for a correction that is not coming. What is written in this book is older than both of us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a written thing from arriving as an accusation.

That speech of yours is not a bad thing. It is not pride and it is not stalling. It is the work of somebody who takes the other person seriously, who would not turn up to something this important with nothing prepared, and who has spent real love on getting it right. I am not going to call that a fault. It comes out of the same hands that press forty napkins so the folds face the same way.

Here is the only trouble with it. You are waiting for the middle to hold, and the middle is never going to hold, and nothing about your welcome was ever built on it. That is not my opinion; it is written into the most famous story Jesus ever told about a person coming home, and I am about to put the line in front of you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you standing at that board long enough to read a page about it.

Nobody has ever explained a distance to God's satisfaction. Not because He is hard to satisfy. Because He never asked for the explanation and there is no such thing as a version that finally works.

He never let the boy finish

The son in that story had a speech too, and Luke gives us the whole draft. He had worked it out on the road. Three parts, same as yours: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee. I am no more worthy to be called thy son. Make me as one of thy hired servants.

That third line is the middle he had been pressing flat all the way home. It is the part where he negotiates his own status down to something he can defend. And here is what happens to it.

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. Before a syllable. The seeing, the compassion, the running and the kiss are all in that verse and the boy has not opened his mouth yet. And when he does open it, he gets out the first two lines and the father talks straight across the top of him, calling for the robe and the ring and the shoes, and the third line never gets said. Not refused. Not heard and waved away. Interrupted.

You are welcomed before your explanation and not after it, and there is no line of yours that has to land first. I am not putting my own kindness over you there; that is Luke 15:20 as it stands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old story and makes it warm in a back room with an ironing board up. The father covered the last hundred yards. The son did not.

What He does with the last stretch

I want you to see who does the running in that verse, because everything turns on it.

The boy walked the road. That was his part and he did it. But the last stretch, the great way off part, the distance that was still there when the father first laid eyes on him, was covered at speed by an old man in a robe who did not care who was watching. Nobody in that culture ran. He ran.

So the picture you have been carrying, of a final hundred yards you must complete under your own steam with the speech in good order, is not the picture in the book. The last stretch is His. It has always been His. It is the part of the story He most obviously wanted us to see.

You have a welcome that is already in motion toward you, and it started while the middle was still not working. That is written in Luke 15 and the Holy Spirit is the one making it land on you in this room. He is not standing at the gate with his arms folded checking the draft. He is already on the road, and he is not walking.

And notice what the father never says. He never says finish your sentence. He never says that was not good enough. He never grades it. The speech simply stops mattering, because a robe is going on the boy's shoulders and there is a calf to be killed and a room to fill.