You Belong To An Older House Than Yours

The roll of brown paper is the kind you buy for wrapping packages, and it runs the whole length of the hallway wall, held up at the corners with blue tape, because the school asked for four generations and four generations does not fit on a sheet.

He is doing the writing, because he is the one who knows who everybody is. Great grandmother at the top, the one who kept chickens and a hammer in the same apron. Her three sons. The uncle nobody can date properly. The aunt who has every birthday in a notebook and has never once been late with a card. His daughter kneels on the floor beside him with the marker lid in her teeth, correcting his spelling.

Good people, the whole way down. That is the part that never fits in the story anybody tells about a man like this. Nobody threw him out. Nobody argued with him. Sunday dinners are warm and long and somebody always sends him home with a container of something.

Then he writes his own name near the bottom, draws the short line under it, and stops. Because the thing that reorganized his entire life at thirty four, the thing he thinks about before he is properly awake, is not on that paper anywhere. Not on his grandmother's line. Not on the uncle's. He has run his eye all the way up that wall, twice, and there is nobody on it who prays.

You know that pause. You have stood in front of your own version of that wall. And somewhere in the quiet afterward you did the arithmetic that has been sitting on you ever since: if nobody handed it to you, then you started it, which makes you the founder of something with one member, and if you put it down it stops.

First is not the word for what you are

Let me take one word off you before we go any further, because it is doing damage and it is not even accurate.

First.

A first begins a line. Nothing stood there before him, and whatever comes after is his to hold up. That is an enormous thing to hand a man who is on his own with it, and you have been carrying it as though somebody had checked it and confirmed it.

Here is what actually happened to you, and it is a different picture entirely.

An orchard keeper takes a green shoot off one tree, cuts a slot in the trunk of another that is older and far deeper rooted, binds the two together and walks away. In the spring the shoot leafs out. Ask that shoot what it started and the question falls apart in your hands. It did not start anything. It was joined into something that had been drinking out of that ground for fifty years before anybody thought of it, and the sap coming up into it is older than the shoot is.

And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.Galatians 3:29

Read that slowly, because Paul is not being poetic there. He is being legal.

You are Abraham's seed this afternoon, and the line you think you began was running for thousands of years before your great grandmother was named. I am not paying you a compliment to soften a hallway. That is the whole clause of Galatians 3:29, set down in writing for people standing exactly where you are standing, and it is the Holy Spirit who joined you into that trunk rather than setting you down by yourself in open ground and wishing you well.

Now take the second half of the verse, because that is where the weight sits. Heirs according to the promise. An heir is not a founder. An heir is the last word of a very long sentence somebody else began, and an inheritance runs backward toward him, never forward out of him. Nobody in the history of the world has inherited a thing he made.

You have a place in a household that was keeping its records long before your family had a name to write on any paper, and not one line of that record was started by you. The promise was given and written down generations before the law was, which is the whole of Paul's argument, and His Spirit is the one who set your name inside it while you were still doing arithmetic in the hallway.

The hallway was never the length of the family

The paper ran out at four generations because that is how long the roll was. It was not a measurement of anything.

The people whose faith is kin to yours were never going to appear on that wall. A shepherd writing songs in the dark while the flock moved around him. A tentmaker with bad eyes. A woman in a kitchen in a country you could not place on a map, an old man who read the same lines you read and read them in a language nobody speaks now, a boy who learned them by ear because he could not read at all. They kept it through fire and famine and forgetting, they handed it along, and it arrived in your thirty fourth year in whatever ordinary room you happened to be standing in.

You did not begin that. You are the current end of it, which is a completely different position, and it comes with company.

You were placed into a family that has been sitting down at the same table for thousands of years, and not one of them regards you as the newcomer who invented the meal. Long before you had a word for any of it the Spirit had done the grafting, and Galatians 3:29 is where the legal fact of it stands written.

Notice what this does to the loneliness inside the word first. If the line runs backward, you are not at the top of anything. You are downstream. Somebody dug in ground you will never see so that water would reach the place where you are standing, and they did not know your name, and they did it anyway.