Kin You Were Not Born To

Somebody had cut two meters off a roll of heavy patterned wallpaper, turned it blank side up, and drawn a family on the back of it in pencil. Great-grandparents in a neat pair of boxes at the top. Their children in a row underneath. Then the next row, and then the grandchildren scattered along the bottom edge, the connecting lines going freehand near the end because the ruler had run out of table.

Forty-one names. She had been asked to fill in the dates, and she was the right person to ask, because she was the one who knew which drawer held the certificates and which shoebox held everything else. A cousin was making the tea and getting it wrong. Somebody's boy was under the table running a plastic tractor along the chair legs. There were four people in that kitchen and every one of them was glad she had come.

She got as far as the third row before the thought arrived, and it arrived the way the true ones do, quietly and fully formed and at the worst possible moment. Forty-one names, and not one of them prays. Not the great-grandmother with the beautiful hand. Not the uncle everybody loved. Nobody on this paper talks to God, and I am the little box in the corner who does.

Then her aunt looked over and said, warmly, that she had always had her own way of seeing things. It was said with love. That is the part that is hard to explain to anybody who has not sat in it: nobody in that kitchen was against her. They passed her the good cookies. They asked after her week and listened to the answer. And when the subject came anywhere near the thing that holds her whole life together, the room went gently, kindly quiet, the way a room goes quiet when somebody mentions a hobby nobody else has.

If that is your kitchen, then you already know that being loved and being met are two different weights, and that a person can sit in the middle of their own blood and still be the only name on the paper who prays.

The record your family keeps is not the only record

Let me put the weight down where it actually sits before anything lifts, because a lift that skips the weight is no use to anybody.

This is not persecution, and part of the difficulty is that it would be simpler if it were. Persecution at least treats a thing as real. What sits on the kitchen table is quieter. Everybody is kind, and kindness is a very comfortable place to be lonely in. There is no fight to have and nothing to forgive, and so the ache never gets a name, and a thing without a name gets carried a long way without anybody noticing the weight of it, including the one carrying it.

There is a line in Paul's letter to the believers at Ephesus that he does not stop to explain, which usually means he thought it was obvious.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.Ephesians 3:14-15

Read that slowly, because it is a sentence about paperwork. In Scripture, to name a family is to father it, to place it, to say whose it is. Your surname came up through the rows from a man four generations above you on that wallpaper. Paul is pointing at a naming that runs the other direction entirely. There is one Father, and every household there is, the ones in heaven and the ones still in kitchens, takes its family name down from Him.

So here is what is true of you while you are still sitting there with the pencil in your hand. You are named out of the Father's own house, and that name did not climb up through the rows to reach you. It came down. I am not handing you an encouraging thought of mine. That is what is written in the letter, and it is His Spirit who turns a written line into ground a person can actually stand on.

Which means the family record on the table is not wrong. It is simply short. It answers one question, and it answers it well: who came before you. It cannot answer the other one, which is the one you were quietly asking over the third row. Who is with me.

And that question has a long, crowded, noisy answer.

You have brothers and sisters you have never met and will not meet on this side, and He is not ashamed of the connection. The word says that the One who makes people holy and the ones being made holy all come from a single source, and that this is the very reason He is not ashamed to call them brothers. The Holy Spirit did not join you to a mood or to an opinion you happen to hold. He joined you into a household, and the roll of that household is longer than any length of wallpaper anybody has ever unrolled.

Kin is not a feeling. Kin is a fact about where you came from, which is exactly why it survives a room going quiet. Nobody at that table has to agree with you for it to be true, and no warmth from them and no distance from them adds a single name to it or takes one off. That is the mercy in it. Your belonging is not being administered by the people who love you. It is held somewhere they cannot reach and cannot spoil.

And you were given a mouth to say so. John writes that to everyone who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God, and the word underneath our English word "right" is a word about authority, not about mood. His Spirit is the one who puts a sentence like that into a person's mouth and makes it more than a sentence.

That is worth pausing on, because most of us think saying it out loud would be presumptuous. It is the opposite. An ambassador who refuses to state his own country's position is not being humble. He is being unhelpful. You are holding a right that was handed to you, and stating a thing you were handed is not pride. It is accuracy.

Jesus set the required quantity of faith at the size of a mustard seed, which is His way of setting a price so low that it stops functioning as a price at all, and then He told the people holding that much to speak to the mountain rather than about it. Notice the direction. Not a report on the mountain. A word to it. Nothing in that passage asks the reader to feel large first.