The Version I Introduce

Wilma heard herself do it at a church supper and could not finish the sentence.

New table, new people, the usual round of who is who. It got to her, and she started the way she always starts, which she had never once noticed until that evening.

She says: well, I am not really a people person, I have always been the one at the back.

She has said it, in various forms, for about thirty years. It is a useful sentence. It is friendly, it is self-deprecating, it explains her in about four seconds and lets the conversation move on.

And standing there at that supper with a paper plate in her hand, at seventy-one, she suddenly heard it from outside, and it was not true.

It has not been true since about 1994.

She runs two things at that church. People phone her. Somebody stood at the front last Easter and said her name and there was actual applause and she had to look at the floor. She has knocked on the door of a house where a woman was in real trouble and stayed four hours, twice, in one week.

She is not the one at the back. She is at the center of a great deal.

But somewhere around thirty-five, that sentence was true, and she made it into an introduction, and she has been handing it to strangers ever since without ever going back to see whether it still described anybody.

It got worse when she thought about it properly on the drive home. That version of herself is not just out of date. It is a woman she buried, deliberately, with a great deal of prayer, over about six years.

And she has been digging her up and standing her at the front of the room every time she meets somebody new.

You may have your own introduction.

Maybe you have a sentence. A joke about yourself that lands slightly wrong now. A category you assign yourself in the first minute so that nobody else has to.

What I am not saying

Let me be plain, because I do not want you hearing an instruction I am not giving.

I am not telling you to hide your history. What you were is part of what you know, and there are rooms in which telling it plainly is the most useful thing you own, and I would not take that off you.

I am not telling you to talk yourself up. That is not the alternative and it would not suit you anyway.

And I am not saying the old version was worthless or that you were wrong to have been her. She was real and she got you here.

What I am asking is a smaller question. Who wrote the introduction, and when, and has anybody checked it lately.

Behold, and the word is new

There is a sentence in 2 Corinthians that people quote as an encouragement and which is actually a statement of fact.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.2 Corinthians 5:17

Note the tense throughout. Are passed away. Are become new. Not shall be. Not are becoming.

And the behold is doing something. It is an instruction to look, which implies there is something to look at, which implies it is visible if a person turns their head.

You have not turned your head. You have been reading from a card written in 1994.

And the account you carry of yourself is thirty years out of date. The written word puts both verbs in the completed tense and then tells the reader to look, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman with a paper plate at a supper.

And you are a new creature and that is not aspirational. The word says if any man be in Christ he is a new creature, present tense and without conditions, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than waiting for you to feel like one.

What the old introduction is doing

Now, let me say what I think it is actually for, because it is not stupidity and it has been serving a purpose.

That sentence protects you. It is a small pre-emptive statement that gets in first: I am not much, so nobody is disappointed later. It has been doing that job faithfully for thirty years and it has never let you down, because a thing that expects nothing cannot fail.

It just costs.

It costs the room, which meets a woman who is not there. And it costs you, because every time you say it you go and get her out of the ground and set her up at the front, and you cannot possibly stop grieving a person you keep exhuming.

And you are not required to arrive at a table pre-diminished. The word says we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, and the Spirit is the one who makes workmanship mean His work rather than your claim.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has spent thirty years getting in first.