She got four sentences in.
It was a lunch table, the kind with somebody's coat on the back of the chair and a paper cup of coffee going cold, and the other woman was kind and she was listening. Four sentences about what happened at that church. And then the kind woman said, warmly, that no church is perfect.
She said, "You're right." She ate the rest of her sandwich. She asked after the woman's son. And that was four years ago, and she has not said one sentence about it to anybody since.
It is not that people were cruel. That would be easier to describe. It is that every single person who heard it handed her a job. Forgive him. Move on. Do not let it steal your joy. Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Find a better one, there are good ones. Every one of those is a task with her name on it, and she took every one of them home and tried to do it. She forgave on the days she could get her hands around it. She drove to two other buildings and sat in the parking lot of both and went home. She built the whole thing back up four separate times, out of her own materials, on her own strength, and four times it came down, because a thing you rebuild yourself is only ever as strong as the day you happened to be having.
So she stopped mentioning it. Not out of bitterness. Out of tiredness. There is only so long a person can hold out a burned thing and be handed instructions.
If that is you, then hear this before anything else, because it is the piece nobody has said to you in years. You were never the contractor on this. Not once. And the quiet you have been keeping is not hardness, it is a woman with her arms full who has run out of people to hand it to.
The verb in that verse is give
There is a line about people in exactly your condition, and it is worth reading slowly, because the whole thing turns on one small word that everybody skates over.
To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.Isaiah 61:3
To give unto them. Not to instruct them. Not to assign them a program of recovery with milestones. The verb is give, and giving is an act performed by the one who has the thing, toward the one who does not, and the only thing required of the receiving end is an open hand.
Look also at who is being addressed. Them that mourn. That is the name Scripture puts on them, and not one word of the sentence corrects them for it. Nobody in that verse gets told the fire was really not so bad, and nobody gets told to hurry.
Right now, as you read, you have an exchange God makes and you were never assigned to make. Isaiah 61:3 puts the giving on His side of the table, and the Holy Spirit does the handing over Himself.
And notice what He exchanges it for. Ashes were not a private feeling in that world. Ashes were what a mourner wore where the neighbors could see, the public sign that something had burned. He does not tell them to wash their face and pretend. He takes what is worn in public and puts something else there in public, in its place.
Which means your part in this is not construction. It is receiving, and receiving is a smaller and harder thing, and it is the thing you have not been given room to do for four years.
You are one of God's people this morning, and it is His giving that put you there and not your rebuilding. That is written into the verse itself, and His Spirit does not wait for a room to vote before He acts on it.
Trees do not join the orchard
Read to the end of the sentence, because the last clause of it settles the question you have actually been carrying.
That they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD. A planting. Somebody else chose the ground and somebody else put the tree in it. There is not a tree anywhere that applied. There is not a tree anywhere that keeps its own root in the soil by trying hard on a Sunday morning, and there is not a tree anywhere that comes out of the ground because it could not walk through a particular door.
That is what I want you to hold. Whatever ended, it was not the planting, because the planting was not yours to end. You did not put yourself in among God's people and no event in a building took you out.
You have a place among His people that His hand set and no hallway holds the title to. Isaiah 61:3 calls you a planting of the Lord in writing, and the same Spirit who planted you keeps you in the ground now.
I am not going to tell you what to do about a door. That is not mine to say, and anybody who has said it to you quickly was not weighing what you are carrying. I am also not going to argue your case against anyone or defend anyone to you. Nobody is on trial in this article. That whole courtroom belongs to God and He is a better judge of it than either of us, and while it is His, it is off your shoulders.
What I am telling you is where your standing is kept, and it is not kept in the place you cannot enter. It is kept in the exchange God performs and in the planting He did.
It is already yours, and it was already yours on the worst afternoon of that year. He said it through the prophet and it has stayed written ever since, and the Holy Spirit is saying it again right where you are standing.
Here is the turn, and it is small, and it is the whole thing.
Put your hands down. You have been holding out a burned thing for years, waiting for somebody to take it, and the people around you kept putting instructions into your hands instead, so your hands filled up with work and were never once empty enough to receive anything.
They are empty now.
You are holding open hands and there is something already in them, put there by God and not earned by you. That was promised in Isaiah 61:3 in writing, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a written promise present tense in a person.
You still belong to God's people. Not later, not once you have made peace with a place, not once you can sit through a service without your chest going tight. Today, on the ground of what He gives and what He planted. What happened there did not remove you, because it was never holding you in the first place.
Declare this over yourself
You speak this on ground that was given to you and not built by you, and you speak it under God's hand, leaving the whole of that place and every person in it to His judgment and His timing, which are better than yours and are not your burden. Isaiah 61:3 tells you who does the giving and who did the planting, and His Spirit turns what is written there into something a person can actually stand on.
- What happened in that building, you took a room from me and you did not take my place. Isaiah 61:3 says God gives beauty for ashes, and giving is done by the One who has it to give. I am one of God's people this morning and my place was never kept in that room.
- Verdict that I was put out, you are overturned in the name of Jesus. The planting is the Lord's and no tree ever set its own root, so nothing that was done and nothing I failed to do has lifted me out of the ground He put me in. I still belong, and I am saying so before I decide one thing about a door.
- Lord, You give. You never handed a mourner a repair job, You handed them the oil of joy and the garment of praise and called them Your own planting. My hands are open this morning and I am receiving instead of rebuilding, and the ashes are Yours to take.
Isaiah 61:3
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