He Writes Up The People And You Are On It

The courtyard has one long table in it, made of two doors on trestles with a cloth over the top, and a string of bulbs slung between the fig tree and a nail in the wall.

Everything is going at once. There is a pot with a lid that will not sit properly. There are four conversations and one of them is an argument about a road that was resurfaced in a year nobody can agree on. Somebody's aunt is putting more food on a plate that already had food on it, over the top of a hand held out to stop her, which is not a real hand and everybody knows it. A boy is under the table with a dog. The light is coming down gold through the fig leaves and the whole thing is warm and loud and absolutely alive.

And the woman at the corner of the table is following about a third of it.

She gets the beginnings of sentences. She gets the tone. When the fast part comes, and it always comes, the whole table tips forward and the words go past her like weather, and then the laugh happens, and half a second later she laughs too. She has done this for years and she has become very good at it. She can produce a laugh that is indistinguishable from a real one, at a distance of half a beat, and nobody at that table has ever known.

You know the half beat. It might be a language for you, or it might be that everybody in the room is thirty years younger, or that they all grew up doing something one way that you learned late and do carefully. Whatever the shape of it, you have sat through the whole of a thing, warm and welcome and perfectly well treated, and gone home with the same sentence in your coat pocket. Lovely people. I was an extra in the room.

There is a city with a register, and God keeps it Himself

There is a short psalm, and it is one of the strangest things in the Bible, and almost nobody preaches it.

It is about a city, and it starts by listing the nations. Not the friendly ones. Rahab, which is Egypt. Babylon. Philistia. Tyre. Ethiopia. If you were an Israelite singing that psalm, you would be singing the names of the countries that had taken your people, taxed your people, fought your grandparents. These are not neighbors. These are the byword nations, the ones you name when you want to say the opposite of us.

And then God says of one after another of them, this one was born there.

Not this one is permitted to visit. Not this one was naturalized after a long process and some paperwork and the goodwill of a committee. Born there. As if the record had never said anything else.

You are entered under that same heading, as one of the born there and not as somebody admitted. Psalm 87:5 says it over one nation after another in writing, and the Holy Spirit did not add an asterisk beside your line.

And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her: and the highest himself shall establish her. The LORD shall count, when he writeth up the people, that this man was born there.Psalm 87:5-6

Look at who is holding the pen in that sentence. The Lord shall count. The Lord writes up the people. It is not the room writing the register. It is not the fluent ones, or the ones who grew up with it, or the ones who know when the fast part is coming and can join in. God does the counting Himself, in His own hand, and He enters people from the byword nations under the same heading as anybody else, and He does not add a note in the margin about how they arrived.

You are written into the register of God's city, and the entry is in His own handwriting. Psalm 87:6 says the Lord counts when He writes up the people, and the Holy Spirit is not consulting the table before He reads your line out.

You have the standing of the native born, and you did not get it by keeping up. That is the word's own sentence about that city, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the reason it is a sentence about you and not a nice thought about somebody in the ancient world.

Who is supposed to be doing the adjusting

Now hold that against the thing you have quietly assumed for years, which is that the belonging runs through the language.

It does not. It never has. And there is a morning in the New Testament that settles the question so completely that it is a wonder anybody is still asking it.

A crowd is standing in a street, from every direction, from a dozen countries, hearing something they cannot account for. And what astonishes them, the thing they keep saying to each other, is not that a message was translated. It is that every single one of them is hearing it in the language they were born to. Acts 2:8 has them asking it out loud. How is it that we hear, every man in our own tongue?

God did not hand out a course. He did not tell a single person in that street to come back when their comprehension improved. He moved the whole room, by His Spirit, into the languages of the people standing in it.

That is the direction the traffic runs in the kingdom of God, and it has never once run the other way.

You were never the extra, not in one single room you have ever sat through. Acts 2:8 has every person hearing in the tongue they were born to, and the Holy Spirit is the reason the room did the moving instead of the people in it.

So let this go, because you have carried it a long time. The third of it you followed was never an examination. Your accent is not something to be got past. The thirty years between you and everybody else in that room is not a deficiency being generously overlooked. The way you were taught to do it, slowly and carefully and late, is not a lesser way of doing it.

None of those things is the door. The door was never a door. It is a register, and it is written up by God, and He wrote you in as born there.

It is already settled that you are at home in this city, and the part you did not follow was never the test. It is written down in the psalm exactly like that, and the Spirit who wrote it is entirely fluent in the language you think in when nobody is listening.