They Told Me What The Evidence Was

Rhona was twenty and it was said to her plainly, by somebody who was not being cruel, and she has never forgotten the exact wording.

She had asked. That is the part that still gets her. She had gone to a person she trusted and asked how you would know, and the person told her, clearly and without hedging, what the evidence was.

And Rhona did not have it. Not that night, not the next month, not in the thirty-one years since.

Nobody said anything unkind to her. Nobody put her out of anything. The person who told her went on being warm to her for years and would be horrified to know any of this.

But Rhona had been given a test, and she had sat it honestly, and she had not passed, and there is only one thing a reasonable person concludes from that.

She has lived inside that conclusion since 1995.

It is not a loud thing. She is not bitter and she has not left. She sings, she serves, she has been on a rota of one kind or another for two decades. But there is a floor under her life that has a crack in it, and the crack says: whatever the others have, you do not have, and you know this because you checked.

She has never raised it since. Not once, in thirty-one years. Partly because she does not want to embarrass anybody, and partly because she is afraid the answer would be the same and delivered just as kindly.

You may have your own exam.

Somebody told you what it would look like. Maybe they were right and maybe they were wrong, and I am not going to tell you which. You looked, and it was not there, and you drew the only conclusion available to a person who takes things seriously.

I am not going to relitigate the exam

Let me tell you what I will not do, because it matters more here than anywhere.

I am not going to tell you the person who told you was wrong. I am also not going to tell you they were right. That question has divided serious, godly, careful people for a very long time, in both directions, and there are people on each side of it who have loved God more than I have.

If you came here hoping I would settle it, I am not going to, and that is not cowardice. It is because you are the person caught in the middle of the argument rather than a combatant in it, and dragging you onto a side would be using your ache to score something.

So there is no exam in this article and there is nothing here you can fail.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The written word makes the Spirit a wind that nobody can account for, and a thing nobody can account for cannot have a mark scheme, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a settling in a woman who has been quietly graded since 1995.

What I want to do instead is put a different sentence beside the one you were given, and let you hold both.

The sealing, and what is attached to it

Here is Paul, in Ephesians, describing what happened.

In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise.Ephesians 1:13

Read the grammar carefully, because it is doing a lot.

Ye were sealed. Passive. Past. Somebody else did it, and it is done.

And now look for the clause that is not there. There is no provided that. No and you will know because. No description of what the sealing feels like, no test to administer to yourself afterwards, no instruction to check.

A seal, in that world, was not something the sealed object could feel. It was a mark of ownership, pressed on from outside, and the entire point of it was that it did not depend on the parcel's opinion.

And you were sealed and it was done to you rather than felt by you. The word puts the verb in the passive and the tense in the past and attaches no evidence clause at all, and the Spirit is the one who makes that ground under a woman who has been standing on a crack for thirty-one years.

And the sealing is not something you can check and fail. The word makes it a mark of ownership pressed from outside, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than issuing you a result.

What thirty-one years of the crack has cost

Now let me say something about the crack itself, because I do not think you have counted what it charges you.

You have been serving on a rota for two decades from underneath a conclusion. You have sung songs you meant while a sentence in your foundation said you were on the outside of the thing you were singing about.

That is a very tiring way to live and nobody has ever known you were doing it.

I am not going to tell you it should not have hurt. It should have. A person you trusted answered your honest question and the answer, through no cruelty of theirs, left you outside.

And you were never on the outside of it. The word says ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, and the sealing is described as having happened rather than as pending, and the Spirit is the one who makes a past tense hold under somebody who has been living in a conditional.

And you are not somebody He has passed over. The word says having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, and the Spirit is the one who makes good pleasure of His will mean what it says.