In Him It Holds

The hotel breakfast room does the same thing every morning. The toaster conveyor hums and drops slices onto a metal tray. There is a jug of orange juice with a plastic ladle, six kinds of little jam pot, and a man in a hotel waistcoat who says good morning, help yourself to every single person who comes through the door and means it every single time.

Twenty people eat in there and nobody speaks. Contract workers, a couple with maps, two women in high visibility jackets on their phones. Nine weeks he has been in this city, nine weeks of this room, and he has learned which table gets the sun. He is not miserable. He gets on with people. That is the strange part, and the part he cannot explain to anybody at home: he is perfectly friendly all day long and he has not had one conversation since April that went anywhere near the middle of him.

There was a small group once, in the town before this one, and before that a church with a wooden floor and a woman named Pat who prayed for his mother. He can list them. He can also list how each one ended: a move, a merger, a falling out he was only half a part of, an illness, a road. And somewhere in the ninth week the thought settled in him with the weight of a conclusion rather than a fear. Even if I found people here, I would lose them. I have lost everybody else.

If you have your own version of that list, you already know it is not self pity. It is arithmetic. You added up the leavings and got a result, and the result told you that belonging is a thing you have to hold together with both hands, and that your hands have been proven unequal to it. Sit down at the table by the window with me. There is something under that arithmetic that nobody ever told you, and it changes who is doing the holding.

Somebody else is doing the holding

Let me say the hard half first, because the tender half is no use until the hard half is honest.

You have lost people. That is real and I am not going to make it into a lesson. Some of them left, some of them died, some of them simply moved and the thread thinned out over two Christmases until it went. And there is a particular exhaustion that comes from having tried: you were the one who suggested the coffee, you were the one who sent the message, and after enough years of being the one who reaches, a person stops reaching and calls it realism. Nobody is going to scold you for that here. Nobody is going to hand you a task at the end of this either.

Because the belonging Scripture is describing was never being held together by you, and the Holy Spirit did not seat you inside it on condition that you keep it there.

And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.Colossians 1:17

Paul writes that about the universe, the stars and the seasons and the ground under a hotel breakfast room. And then he says the same word about the church a few lines later, because Christ is the head of that body too, and the thing that keeps a body a body is not the enthusiasm of the individual parts.

So hear it plainly, and hear it as a finished thing. You are held. Not on your best week, not while you were making the effort: held, now, in a keeping that has nothing to do with your capacity this year. I am not offering you my own warm opinion. That is what is written in Colossians 1:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line about all things and lands it in one man's chest at a breakfast table.

And it goes further. You have not been put on the edge of the people of God as a spare. Paul told a room full of outsiders that they were no longer strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Ephesians 2:19, and look at the word he refused to use. Not guests. Not the ones we are being kind to. Members of a household, which is a standing, not a level of attendance. His Spirit is the one who made that true of you, and He did not do it provisionally.

Now hear what that does to the arithmetic.

If belonging were a rope you were holding, then every loss really would be evidence about your grip, and you would be right to brace. But the rope is not in your hands. Jesus said of His own that no one will snatch them out of His hand, and then said it a second time about His Father's hand, as though once were not emphatic enough. John 10:28 and 29. Two hands, and neither of them is yours, and neither of them has ever got tired.

That is why faith the size of a crumb off that toaster tray is enough to speak with. The mountain here is a conclusion, not a place: I lose people, therefore I am not really among any. You do not have to argue that conclusion down or feel differently about it first. You have permission to open your mouth and speak to it, because the standing you speak from is Christ's and He has given it to you, and speaking is what He appointed us to do with what He said. His Spirit does the rest, and the rest was never yours.