Word Perfect Over the Baby

The tables are set out on the slope above the bay because that is where they have always been set out, and somebody has weighted the cloths down with beach stones against the breeze.

The baby is six weeks old and has been passed along the whole length of both tables. Now she comes back up the line and lands in his arms, and his sister says what she was always going to say. Go on. Say the blessing over her.

Everybody stops. Forks down. The cousins turn round on the grass.

He looks at the small face and he says it, and it comes out whole. Every phrase in the right order. The keeping and the shining and the lifting up and the peace, the words his own grandfather said over him on this same slope, and he does not stumble on one of them and he does not have to reach. He means every syllable. The bay is behind him and the light is coming in low across the tables and there is not a person there who doubts he means it.

Amen, says the family, all down the line, and somebody claps, and the baby is lifted off him and away to the next set of arms, and the forks start again.

He walks down to the edge of the slope with his cup, where the grass gives way to the path.

He is not troubled. He is quiet. He has just said more out loud to God in ninety seconds than in every ordinary evening of the last long while put together, and every word of it was true. That is the thing sitting in him. Not that he did not mean it. That he did.

You said the words too, somewhere, and you meant them. And you have never once doubted a line of it. That is exactly why this has been so hard to name.

The words were true, and they were true out loud

Let me begin where a lot of people would not, which is on your side of it.

Your faith is real. Not remembered, not residual, not a habit left over from a house you grew up in. When you said the blessing over that baby it was not a recitation, it was a conviction with a voice, and the family heard the difference because there is one. Anybody who tells you that a belief you never doubted must have been counterfeit all along is not reading you and is not reading Scripture either.

So we are not going to spend a single line here suggesting the believing was fake. That is not what this is.

Here is what this is. Belief that has never wobbled is a real thing. It is simply not the same thing as living near Him, and the reason this has taken so long to name is that the first one keeps standing in for the second. Nothing was ever off. The doctrine held, the words came when they were called for, the box would still be ticked. And meanwhile the ordinary evenings went by with nobody speaking.

You are holding a real faith in your hands and it was never the counterfeit, and the distance is real too and neither one cancels the other. That is not a soft word to spare your feelings. It is written into the whole shape of Deuteronomy 30, where Moses talks to people whose belief was never the question, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been keeping both halves true in you at once.

Not over the sea

Moses is at the end of everything he has to say, and he takes one run at the thing that stops people, which is the idea that God is a long way off and getting to Him is a project.

It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go over the sea for us? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.Deuteronomy 30:12-14

Read the two questions he heads off. Who will go up for us. Who will go over the sea for us. Both of them assume a journey somebody has to make, and both of them are answered the same way: there is no journey, the word is already here.

And notice where he says it already is. In your mouth. In your heart. Those are exactly the two places you have proof of, because the words came out whole over that baby and you meant them all the way down. The evidence you have been reading as your accusation is actually the verse being fulfilled in front of the family.

You have the word already in your mouth and already in your heart, and the sea you thought you had to cross was never between you and Him. Deuteronomy 30 puts it there, not my encouragement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept it there through every evening nobody spoke.

That is why the walk back is not the length of the drift. The drift was made of ordinary days. The nearness was never removed to a different country while they went past.

The nearness is His doing

Now the part I most want you to have, because it takes the whole weight off your arms.

If the nearness had to be built, then a long stretch of ordinary evenings would be a long stretch of lost ground, and coming near would mean laying it all again, one day at a time, hoping to reach the place it used to be. That is the arithmetic running quietly in the background. It is also not the gospel.

But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.Ephesians 2:13

Made nigh. Passive. Done to you, by Him, at a cost that was His. Paul does not say you must approach until you are close enough to qualify. He says the far off have been brought near, and the bringing is finished, and the blood is what did it.

You were made near by Christ, and near is what you are while you are still working out how to speak to Him again. Ephesians 2:13 is where that stands, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a finished thing feel true to a person standing on the grass with a cup in his hand.

So there is no ground to relay. There is a nearness to walk in that was purchased and applied and is not waiting on your consistency to become real.