Then The Lord Will Take Me Up

The keys went into an envelope, and the envelope went across a desk, and that was the whole of it.

Fifteen years on that ring. The one with the tape on it opened the side door that stuck in wet weather. The little brass one was the closet with the extension cords, which he had labeled himself, in marker, because he got tired of untangling other people's. He knew which breaker tripped when the heaters and the coffee ran at the same time. He had been on a ladder in that building more times than he had been on a ladder at his own house.

What happened is not what this page is about. There was a meeting, and a decision, and a sentence said out loud in a room, and afterward everybody was polite. I am not going to argue his case here and I am not going to argue anybody else's. Some things happen and then a man is on the outside of them, and the arguing about it is a different job than the one we are doing this afternoon.

Here is where you actually live now. It is a Saturday, and you wake up with a job list in your head for a building you no longer have a key to. Gutter over the north side. That second riser was still loose. And for about four seconds it is an ordinary morning, and then you remember, and the list has nowhere to go, and you lie there and stare at the ceiling until the coffee finishes.

Somewhere in the first year you started doing arithmetic on yourself. Fifteen years, minus one meeting, equals a man who is not part of anything. You would not say it out loud in those words. But you have not walked into any building since, and you have quietly stopped counting yourself among God's people, and you did not decide that on any particular day. It settled on you the way dust settles.

The verse puts both events at the same hour

David writes one line that has carried more people through this than almost anything else in the Psalms, and the power of it is entirely in a small word most readers step over.

He reaches for the strongest example of abandonment available to a human being. Not a friend. Not a colleague. Not a committee. He names the two people who structurally cannot leave you, the two whose leaving is not supposed to be possible, and he says it out loud as a hypothetical he is willing to sit inside.

And then comes the hinge word. Then.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.Psalm 27:10

Not afterward, once the dust settles. Not eventually, when he has proved he came through it well. Then. At that hour. At the exact point of the setting down, there is a taking up, and the two are the same moment viewed from two directions.

You were taken up at the same hour you were set down. Psalm 27:10 puts the leaving and the taking up in one instant, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that timing honest when a man's memory wants to stretch it out into years.

That is the pit named and filled in one line. The pit is the arithmetic. The subtraction you have been running on yourself since the envelope went across the desk assumes that the removal happened and nothing else happened. Something else happened. It happened the same afternoon, and nobody was in the room to see it, which is why it has taken until now to reach you.

You are still one of God's people, and fifteen years did not buy that and one meeting could not sell it. That was written down about three thousand years before that building ever went up, and the Spirit did not hand your standing over to a room.

Find out what was actually bearing the weight

Any builder will tell you that you learn what is load bearing by removing something and watching what happens.

Take out a partition and the ceiling does not move: that wall was carrying itself and a coat rack. Take out a post and the whole span sags: now you know. It is a hard way to learn a structure and it is the only way some structures ever get learned.

So run it honestly. If your place among God's people had been carried by that building, then the day the building came off you, your place would have come down with it. Prayer would have gone flat. The word on the page would have gone gray. The Spirit would have gone quiet, because the thing holding it all up had been pulled.

Now, has it. Ask it plainly, because you are the only one who can answer it. In the months since, has God spoken to you off that page. Has anything come to you at four in the morning that you did not think up yourself. Has He kept you.

You have a standing among His people that was never carried by that building. The word bears that weight, and the Spirit is what set it under you before you ever had a key to anything.

I want to be exact about the ground, because this is the whole of it. You are one of God's people because God takes people up. It is His action, in His own words, at His own timing, and Psalm 27:10 does not make the taking up conditional on the leaving being fair, or resolved, or explained, or forgiven yet on any particular schedule.

It is already settled, and the sentence that you were put out of the people of God has no right to stay. He promised to take up, not to consider taking up, and His Spirit does not make a written promise sit and wait for a better year.