Everybody In That Room Says One Day

The waiting area has good chairs, which is unexpected, and a fish tank, and a poster about hand washing that has been there so long the corners have gone soft.

She has been coming here long enough to know which seat has the plug socket.

The woman across from her is lovely. Two visits ago they got talking and now they always do, and today the woman leans over and pats her arm and says the thing that everybody says, in the voice that everybody uses.

You wait. Things turn around. My sister was exactly the same and look at her now.

And she smiles and says something warm back, because the woman is being kind and because it costs nothing to be gracious in a waiting room.

Forty-two years old. In her bag there is a folder, and in the folder there is a letter using verbs that nobody in this room would use out loud, and she has read it eleven times.

Everybody she loves speaks about her in the future. Her husband. Her mother, who prays and cries and prays. The good people at church, who mean every syllable. All of them, all the time, in the tense that comes after now.

And she sits with the fish tank bubbling and thinks the thing that has been forming for months, which is: has anybody, ever, said anything about me in the present tense.

If you have sat in that chair, you know the kindness is genuine and you know it lands like a door being held open onto a room you cannot get to.

Now is a tense and John uses it deliberately

Weigh it first. This site does not hurry to the good part, and a woman with a folder in her bag has earned the honest paragraph before the warm one.

What this costs is not hope exactly. It is the loneliness of being loved in the wrong tense. It costs the ordinary experience of being talked about as somebody who is, rather than somebody who might be. It costs the ability to say the true thing at church without watching four faces reorganize themselves. It costs your mother's prayers landing on you as pressure, which is nobody's fault and is still what happens. And it costs you a private question in a waiting room that you have never asked a single person out loud.

I am not calling that small and I am not measuring it against anybody else's, because nothing on this site ranks one person's load against another's. Any word from God that needs your folder made lighter before it can be spoken is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the eleven readings of that letter have taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking the people who love you would have easier lives without the whole business of you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one friend who will sit down without needing the folder explained, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to carry that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who turn up and stay.

Now, John. An old man writing to people who were being told they were nothing much.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.1 John 3:1-2

There are two tenses in that passage and he uses both of them on purpose, and the whole comfort is in the order he puts them.

Now are we. That is the first one, and it is present, and it is flat, and it is not conditional on anything.

Then, and only then, the other one. It does not yet appear what we shall be. He is entirely willing to say that the future is not visible. He does not know what it looks like. He will not describe it.

So the man who has the least information about the future is the one who is most definite about the present, and that ordering is not an accident, it is pastoral care from somebody who had watched a lot of people die.

You are a child of God now, in the present tense, and John says so before he says anything about later. First John 3:2 begins with the word now, and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness with your spirit that it is true of you personally rather than generally.

Read the word bestowed, too, because it is doing work. Not lent. Not offered on terms. Bestowed, which is what a king does, publicly, at a moment, to somebody who then walks around being what they have been made.

You have a status that was conferred rather than achieved, and nothing in your folder was consulted about it. That is written into 1 John 3:1, and His Spirit is the one who makes a conferred name feel like a fact in a chair beside a fish tank.

Now let me be exact, because you have been handled kindly and inaccurately for a long time.

That passage tells you nothing whatever about your body. It does not say the letter is wrong. It does not say things turn around. It makes no prediction about you at all, and neither will I, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and every confident sentence about somebody else's prognosis is a person guessing in a warm voice.

And here is the strange mercy in it: John will not predict either. It doth not yet appear. He is the last man in the New Testament you could accuse of selling anybody a future.

What he is definite about is the present. Which is exactly the tense nobody in that waiting room has used about you.

You were made a child of God at a moment, and now is the word Scripture puts in front of it. The word says now are we the sons of God, and the same Spirit who cries Father inside a person is the guarantee of it, so the present tense in your life is not empty, it is simply not being spoken by anybody in the room.