The Crate of Instruments

The mat is the big foam kind that comes in interlocking squares and never quite goes back together the same way, and one corner of it has been chewed by something that everybody has agreed not to investigate.

Thursday mornings, half nine. A church hall with a hatch to a kitchen and a tea urn that takes forty minutes and gets switched on by whoever gets there first. Twenty-odd adults, a great many small people, and the sound of a room where nobody can finish a sentence.

At half ten the crate comes out.

It is a green plastic crate with twelve shakers in it, a tambourine with one jingle missing, four bells and a set of things nobody can name. It gets emptied onto the mat and then there is singing, badly, loudly, with actions, for about fifteen minutes, and it is the best part of the morning and every adult in that room would tell you so.

She has been coming for eight months and she has never once been there for it.

At about twenty past ten she starts. The bag. The coat. The particular business of getting a toddler into shoes, which is a legitimate fifteen minute operation and which is also, for her, a reliable exit. And by the time the crate is on the mat she is at the door saying see you next week to a woman who always says it back warmly.

The reason is not the singing and it is not the room. It is a thing another person did, a long way back, and it has left her feeling that she has to work something up in herself before she is entitled to stay anywhere.

Let me say who I am speaking to. Today I am speaking to you, the one carrying what somebody else did. I am not going to ask you what it was. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

And before you brace: nobody here is setting you a pace. Leaving early is not a sin, this site will never call it one, and there is no timetable in this message.

The word is a standing, not a feeling

There is a line in Hebrews that gets read as a pep talk and is nothing of the sort.

Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompence of reward.Hebrews 10:35

The word behind confidence is parrhesia. It does not mean self assurance and it does not mean a feeling in the chest.

In the world that letter was written into, parrhesia was a civic thing. It meant the right to speak openly in a public assembly. It was what a free citizen had and what a slave did not, and it was a standing rather than a mood, and nobody ever had to work it up because you either held it or you did not.

Read the instruction again with that in your hand.

Cast not away. You cannot cast away a mood. You can only cast away a thing you are holding. The whole grammar of that sentence assumes you already have it.

You already hold the standing to be in that room and to speak in it, and you were never asked to produce it out of yourself. I am not offering you an encouraging gloss. The written word uses a word for civic standing and an instruction about not discarding, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page and gets it into a woman getting a toddler into shoes at twenty past ten.

Nothing in it is about how you feel on a Thursday

Now the practical half, and it is a relief.

You have been treating your right to be in that hall as something that has to be earned each week by feeling a certain way when you walk in. Feel steady enough, stay. Do not feel steady enough, leave at twenty past.

That is an exhausting arrangement and it has never once been the deal.

A standing does not fluctuate. A citizen who wakes up anxious is not less of a citizen that day. The parrhesia in that verse was bought and given, and the whole letter has been explaining at length exactly how it was bought, and none of the explanation involves anything that happens in your chest at half ten on a Thursday.

You are held in a standing that does not go up and down with the morning, and you were given it rather than assessed for it. Scripture spends nine chapters on how that standing was purchased and never once makes it conditional on a feeling, and it is His Spirit, not a good Thursday, who makes a settled right feel like a settled right.