Three Years of Masking Tape

The entry panel is on the left of the door, six brass buttons in a column, and beside each button a small plastic window with a printed card behind it.

Flat one, a printed card. Flat two, a printed card, and a wreath that goes on the door the first week of December every year without fail. Flats three, five and six, printed cards, the landlord's typeface, black on cream, all of them square in their little windows.

Flat four is a strip of masking tape with a name written on it in marker pen.

He put it there the week he moved in, standing in the rain with the pen from his jacket, because the printed card had not arrived and he wanted the post to find him. It took about forty seconds.

The card came later. Two months, maybe, in an envelope with a rent statement, a stiff cream rectangle already cut to size with his surname on it in the landlord's typeface. It lives in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and the spare fuses and the menus from places that have since closed. He has picked it up perhaps a dozen times.

Three years now. The tape has gone gray along its top edge where the rain gets in under the lip of the panel, and the marker has faded from black to a sort of brown. Twice a year, roughly, when he notices it on the way in, he goes over the letters again with a fresh pen.

He has never once opened that little window and slid the card in.

He does not have a reason. Ask him and he would say he keeps meaning to, and that would be true, and it would not be the answer.

The answer is that a printed card is what a man puts up when he is staying.

Everything else about his life says staying. The job has his name on a payroll that runs monthly and has run monthly for three years. The tenancy is in his name. The letter came, and then the second letter, and the whole question that used to sit on his chest at four in the morning has been settled in an office by people who have never met him. He knows the bin day. He knows which of the six buttons sticks in cold weather and he tells the delivery drivers so.

And nothing in him feels rooted. Not one thing.

He watches the family in flat six leave three bicycles in the hall the whole of the summer, as if the hall belonged to them, which in a way it does. He watches the woman in flat two carry her wreath up the stairs in the first week of December. And he thinks: that is what rooted looks like from the outside, and I have none of that on the inside.

So he has reached a conclusion, quietly, across about the last year, and he has never once said it to another human being.

The rooting failed. Whatever is supposed to happen when a man gets moved from one ground to another did not happen in him. He was lifted too late, or with too little of the old soil left on him, and the thing did not take.

Now let me stop calling him he.

Because you have your own strip of tape. Perhaps it is the temporary address you still give people out of habit. Perhaps it is a box of your own things at somebody else's house that has never come across, or the fact that you have never once described the place where you live using the word home in an ordinary sentence, without the sentence going slightly odd in your mouth.

Sit down. Nothing here is going to ask you to feel anything.

Nobody has ever felt their own roots

Let me take the conclusion off the table first, because it is heavier than the tape and you have been carrying it a lot longer.

Colossians 2:7 does not ask a single person to get rooted. Look at what the verbs are doing there: rooted, built up, established, and every one of them is something done to a man rather than something achieved by one. You are rooted. Present tense, on a wet Tuesday, in a stairwell where nothing whatsoever feels like it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that sentence in front of you this evening rather than the one standing back waiting for you to produce some evidence of it.

Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.Colossians 2, verses 6 and 7

Read it slowly and notice who is doing what. The one thing asked of the man in that sentence is to walk. Everything structural, everything below ground, is in the passive, and the Spirit who inspired it did not hide the grammar. Somebody else did the rooting.

I have no standing to tell you that three gray years are not a verdict on you. Jeremiah 17:8 has that standing, where the tree by the water is described as sending its roots out to the stream and not being anxious in the year of drought. You have roots in water you have never once been able to see, and the Spirit carried that line out of a besieged city and into a stairwell the prophet could not have imagined. Notice what the tree is never asked to do. It is not asked to feel the stream. It is beside it.

Here is where the trouble actually lives, and it is not in your chest.

You have been auditing yourself with the wrong instrument. Feeling is a superb instrument for weather and a useless one for foundations, and the word for rooted in Colossians 2 is a finished word, a thing done and standing done, the way footings are gone in under a wall long before anybody moves the furniture in. Nobody stands in a room and feels the footings. The Holy Spirit is not withholding the sensation from you as a lesson, because there is no sensation to withhold.

Somebody probably told you, kindly, that it takes about two years to settle somewhere. You were handed a schedule, and then in your own reckoning you failed the schedule, and a failed schedule quietly turned into a diagnosis of your character. Ephesians 3:17 hands out no schedule at all. It asks that Christ dwell in the heart through faith, being rooted and grounded in love, and it is prayed over people who are already standing in it, with the Spirit strengthening the inner man so that they can grasp what they are already standing on. There is no timetable in that prayer and nobody is late.

And that is not my read of your three years.

Colossians 2:10 is: you have been filled in Him, who is the head of all rule and authority. Filled, past tense, sealed. The Spirit wrote that over a congregation in a town the writer had never visited, and He is not shy about writing it over a flat He has never been invited into either.