Nobody Ever Voted You In

The card is one of those enormous ones with a cartoon on the front, and it has been traveling round the canteen table for a quarter of an hour, and it arrives beside her between the yoghurt pot and the tea.

There are eight of them squeezed in at the afternoon break. Somebody is explaining an awning. Somebody else is doing the crossword out loud and getting it wrong on purpose because it makes the quiet one laugh. The card comes with a biro that has been chewed flat at the end, and she writes the thing you write, which is that all the best and it will not be the same without you.

And she means it, entirely. These are good people. Six years she has worked beside them. She knows which of them takes sugar, and whose mother is poorly this month, and which one cannot be trusted near the fridge, and they know the same sort of things about her, and there is real warmth in it, the kind that gets a person through a hard shift.

Not one of them knows the sentence she said at the bus stop that morning, in the rain, out loud, with her hood up.

"Lord, I do not know how much longer I can do this on my own."

She is not lonely at that table. That is the part that catches people out, and it is the part nobody warns you about. A person can be thoroughly well companioned and completely unaccompanied at the same time, and the good company makes it harder to name rather than easier, because who would you complain to, and about what.

You know the arithmetic of it. You believe every word of this. You could not be talked out of it. And when you run your eye down the whole list of the people in your life, the kind ones and the funny ones and the ones who would drive you to hospital at three in the morning, there is not a single name on it that believes it with you.

So somewhere along the way you started to suspect that a people is a thing other people have.

A people is made. It is not gathered.

Here is a distinction that will hold weight, so let it take a minute.

A crowd assembles. A crowd is just a number of individuals who ended up in one place at one time, and if enough of them wander off, there is no crowd left. Nobody has to do anything to a crowd to make it exist. It happens the way weather happens.

A people is a different kind of thing altogether. A people is constituted. There is a moment before which it did not exist and after which it did, and something outside the members of it did the constituting. No nation on this earth ever voted itself into being. The vote comes later, and it comes to people who are already a people, and it can only ever rearrange what somebody else brought into existence.

That is the exact word Peter reaches for, and it is worth hearing without softening it.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.1 Peter 2:10

Read the grammar and not just the sentiment. He does not say you were not in a people. He does not say you were lonely, or on the edge, or between congregations, or going through a quiet season. He says you were not a people, which is not a description of a mood. It is a description of what did not exist. And the thing that changed it is not a decision anybody made about joining. It is mercy, arriving, from outside, and it is the Spirit of God who carried it in.

You are one of God's people this afternoon, and there was no meeting at which that was decided. I am not offering you my sympathy in a nicer shape; that sentence is Peter's, written down and kept for exactly this purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who joined you into what God made, without asking the room for a show of hands. Nobody proposed you. Nobody seconded it.

The room you are in is not the size of the people you are in

Now, this is where a reader like you usually does the sum and gets the wrong answer, and I want to interrupt it before it finishes.

The sum goes: I know of nobody. Therefore I have nobody. Therefore whatever 1 Peter 2:10 says about a people, it is describing something I am formally included in and practically outside of.

It is a clean sum and it has one bad figure in it. You are counted among God's people by an act that happened outside your address book, and you were counted before the arithmetic started. That much is written down, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the counting rather than the room.

But the count in your kitchen was never the count. The people of God is not a room. It is a very old and very wide thing that has been running for a long time in languages nobody ever taught you, across ground you will never stand on, through centuries that closed before your grandparents were thought of, and it did not shrink to fit the number of believers within walking distance of your house this week.

There is a way of feeling this that is not sentimental. Somewhere, at every hour of every day, the sun is coming up on somebody who is saying the same three or four things to the same God you were talking to at that bus stop. Not metaphorically. Actually, right now, in Tagalog and in Amharic and in Portuguese and in Welsh. You are not the last one awake in the house. You are one of the ones awake in the house.

You have a share in a people older than every room you have ever been disappointed by, and the share is not provisional. Scripture keeps calling it a nation and a household and a body, which are all words for a thing with a real inside, and His Spirit is the one who set you within it and is not in the habit of moving people back out to the porch. Nothing about your week put you there. Nothing about your week takes you out.