The Card in the Battery Drawer

Marion has a card in the drawer under the kettle.

It is in with the batteries and the fuses and three takeaway menus for a place that shut two years ago. It is not a birthday card. It is a plain card with a wren on the front, from three women off the committee, and inside, in proper fountain pen, it says: you carried the whole thing with such grace.

That was written in April. It is still in the drawer in August. She has not thrown it out and she has not stood it up on the shelf either, and if you asked her why, she would not be able to give you a straight answer, which is itself a sort of answer.

People say versions of that sentence to her all the time now. You handled it so well. You never said one word against anybody. I honestly do not know how you did it.

She says thank you. She always says thank you.

Then she gets in the car, and she does the sum, and the sum never comes out.

Because Marion knows what was actually in her. She knows about the message she wrote at twenty past one in the morning in March, the one with three sentences in it that would have finished a friendship, and she knows she deleted it because her thumb was shaking and not because she had a change of heart. She knows she wanted the complaint traced. Not withdrawn. Traced, back to a specific kitchen, with a specific person having to explain themselves at a specific table.

She knows she stopped praying for one woman by name in February and did not miss it.

She knows about the version of the meeting she has run in the shower two hundred times, the one where she is calm and devastating and everybody in the room finally understands.

So when somebody hands her a card with the word grace on it, she does not hear a kindness. She hears an accurate description of a woman who was not there. And the gap between the woman on the card and the woman in the car has stopped feeling like modesty and started feeling like something she is getting away with.

That is the part nobody sees. Not the trouble. The gap.

The part that has not appeared yet

John does something strange with the timing, and almost nobody notices it, because it sits in a verse people quote for the last half and skip the first.

Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared. Two clocks, running at once, in one sentence. The status is present tense. The visibility is future tense. And John does not treat that as a problem to be solved or apologized for. He states it as the ordinary condition of a believer and walks straight on to the next thing.

1 John 3:2 puts the word now in front of the standing and the words not yet in front of the view. So take it in that order: you are God's child now, this morning, in a supermarket car park with a sum that will not come out. The seeing comes later, at a time He has set, and the Spirit who put that now into John's hand is not waiting on your evidence before it is true.

Now let me say what I am not doing here, because there is a version of this that would be no help to you at all.

I am not going to tell you the card is right and your memory of March is wrong. I was not in your kitchen at one in the morning and I do not get to overwrite what you know. Something else is available, and it is better. You are not required to believe the card. What is written asks something different of you: 1 John 3:20 says that whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything. Greater. Not more lenient, not softer about it. Greater, as in higher court, and the Holy Spirit put that line into a letter written for people doing exactly the sum you do in the car.

Sit with the word John chooses for the not yet part, because it is a word about light.

Appeared. Made visible. Lit. Not made real, not achieved, not finally earned after enough good behavior. Lit, the way a thing that has been standing in a room the whole time is lit when somebody opens the curtains. That is the word, and it means you are not a fraud in an unlit room; you are a child of God in an unlit room, and 1 John 3 says so in the present tense while the Spirit keeps the sentence alive in a woman who cannot see a thing from where she is standing.

And that is not my generous reading of your February.

Look at how John opens the whole passage. He begins with the word see. See what kind of love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God. And so we are. Given, past tense, already handed over. You have that love in your hands right now, before the card, before the committee, before March and before whatever you thought at one in the morning, and the Spirit is the one pressing that word given until it stops being theology and starts being your address.

I want the card out of the evidence file altogether now, in both directions.

Because it cuts two ways, and this is where this particular kind of pain gets its grip. If three women in fountain pen are the proof that you are good, then Sheila at the shop is a jury, and a jury can be wrong, and a jury can change its mind, and you will spend the rest of your life managing one. God is not building His case out of anybody's handwriting, and He is not building it out of your midnight either. He is standing on what is written, children of God, now, and His Spirit does not run a second file. You are outside both courts.

One more thing, and it is the one that actually lets a person breathe.

Where does Scripture ever ask you to verify your own standing from the inside? Go looking. It does not. 1 John 3:2 hands the verification to a day that has not arrived yet, and says plainly what will settle it: we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is. You were never issued the instrument for this, and the Spirit is not withholding a reading you were supposed to be able to take. The feeling was never the measure. Neither was the fountain pen.

Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared. But we know that when He appears we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is.1 John 3:2