He Said I Am, Not I Will Be

Three pans going and the extractor fan that has never worked properly, and eleven people in a kitchen built for four.

His granddaughter is on the counter where she is not supposed to sit. Somebody's husband is carving badly and being told so. There is a dog under the table taking a professional interest.

Sixty-five. It has been going on for seven years and the last eighteen months have been a different thing altogether.

Earlier, in the front room, before all this, his son sat down beside him and said the good thing, the thing his son has been carrying around wanting to say for weeks.

Dad, there is a resurrection. You know that. One day, all of it, everything gets put right.

And he said yes. He said it warmly, because his son had been brave to say it.

And then everybody went to eat and he sat for another minute on his own in the front room, holding the thing he could not say back, which is that it did not reach him. Not because it is not true. He believes it entirely, has done for fifty years.

It did not reach him because it is a long way off, and he is here, and the distance between those two is the exact size of the last eighteen months.

If somebody has handed you the end of everything as a comfort for a Tuesday, you know they were right and you know it landed somewhere behind you.

Martha said the right thing and He corrected her anyway

Weigh it first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes first and it never gets shortened to arrive at the good one.

What this costs is not doctrine. It costs the usefulness of it. It costs you the ability to be comforted by the thing you actually believe, which is a strange and lonely position to be in and one you cannot explain to your son without hurting him. It costs the last eighteen months, which have been a different thing altogether and which nobody in that kitchen fully knows about. It costs you the minute alone in the front room. And it costs the honest reply, permanently, because the right answer to a brave sentence is thank you.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your seven years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the last eighteen months have gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking that kitchen would be lighter without you in the front room at all, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the son who sat down beside you, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who come and sit down and say the brave thing.

Now, John 11, and watch what happens between two people at the edge of a village.

Martha's brother has been dead four days. She comes out to meet Jesus and she says something entirely correct.

She says: I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.

She is not wrong. That is orthodox, it is exactly what she had been taught, and it is what your son said in the front room. And Jesus, who never corrects true statements for sport, corrects it.

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.John 11:25

I am. Present tense. A person, standing in a road, in front of a woman who is upset.

He does not say she is wrong about the last day. He moves the whole thing from a date to Himself, and He does it because a date cannot be leaned on and a person can.

You are being handed a person rather than a date, and He made that correction to somebody who had the doctrine exactly right. John 11:25 puts the resurrection in the present tense as a name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a conversation at the edge of a village and sets it down in a front room.

Now notice where He was standing when He said it. Not in the future. Four days into a family's worst week, on a road, with a woman who was grieving and slightly cross with Him, in an ordinary place on an ordinary afternoon.

You have the resurrection in the room rather than at the end of the calendar. That is written into John 11:25, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes a present tense name mean something in a house with three pans going.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because seven years of true things have already been said in that front room.

It says nothing about your body. Nothing about the eighteen months or the next eighteen. He is not promising you what He did for Lazarus, and I am not going to imply it, because what God does in your body is His, in His own way, and a man who turns that story into a prediction is selling something.

And it does not tell you your son was wrong. He was right, and he was brave, and the last day is real and is coming. What Jesus does with Martha is not a correction of the doctrine. It is a relocation of it, from a date you cannot reach to a person who is present.

You were never asked to be carried by a date. Scripture puts I am in the mouth of Jesus in the present tense, and the same Spirit who dwells in you is the one who makes a name portable.