A Cat Box on My Knee

There is a leaflet rack by the door with about nine leaflets in it and four of them are about ticks, and everybody who has ever waited in that room has read all nine.

Two dogs, at opposite ends, being kept at opposite ends by an arrangement everybody has agreed to without discussing. A rubber floor. A poster about a rabbit that has been up so long the corner has gone furry. Somebody's umbrella dripping into the little cup thing they put out when it rains.

She has the box on her knee rather than on the floor, because the floor is where the dogs are, and there is a small furious passenger inside it who has expressed a view about the whole outing.

Her turn comes and she is remarkable.

She has the dates. She has what he has eaten and not eaten and when, and how much water, and she noticed a thing on Tuesday and she says exactly what it was without any of the vagueness people usually bring. She asks two good questions. She says, and I do not want him distressed if it can be helped, in a voice that is entirely pleasant and that leaves the vet in no doubt at all.

Fifteen years she has done this. She is not shy in that room and she never has been.

And she has not said a word to God on her own account for two years.

For the cat, once or twice, in a general way. For her sister constantly. For herself, nothing, because there is a thing nobody knows about her and it sits between her and any sentence that starts with the word I.

Sit down on the bench with me. Today I am speaking to the one carrying something nobody knows, who took it to God straight a long time back and meant it, and cannot now speak for herself.

And before you brace: nothing here makes naming it a condition, and not naming it is not avoidance, and I will not have it called that.

Read whose faith it rests on

There is a sentence in Ephesians that stacks three words up in a row and then names what the whole stack is standing on.

In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.Ephesians 3:12

Boldness. Access. Confidence. Three words for the same territory, piled up the way you pile things up when you are trying to make somebody believe a thing they will not believe the first time.

And then the ground: by the faith of him.

Not by your faith. The older reading of that phrase, and the plain sense of the words, is that the access rests on His faithfulness. It is His reliability that holds the arrangement up, not the quality of yours on a Tuesday afternoon in a room that smells of disinfectant.

Which changes what the two years have been.

You have not been failing to generate enough confidence. There was never any confidence for you to generate. The confidence in that sentence is a report about how solid the arrangement is, and the arrangement was made and is held by Somebody whose faithfulness has not moved.

You have boldness and access resting on the faithfulness of Christ, and you were never the one holding it up. I am not offering you a lighter version. The written word names whose faith the access stands on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a woman with a box on her knee.

You already know how to speak for somebody who cannot

Now let me point at something you have, because you have it in abundance and you have never once turned it round.

You can speak for a creature that cannot speak for itself. You do it well. You do it without a shred of self consciousness, because when you are speaking for him you are not the subject, and being the subject is the whole of the difficulty.

Here is the thing I want to put beside that.

In that verse, you are not the subject either.

The access is not a report on you. It is a report on Him. When you come, the question in the room is not what sort of person has turned up, it is whose faithfulness the arrangement rests on, and that question was settled a long way before you got to the door.

You are covered by an arrangement that does not turn on you, and you were never the subject of the hearing. Scripture puts the faithfulness in His name in that verse, and it is His Spirit, not a better afternoon, who lets a person speak on her own account in a room where she is not the one being examined.