They Say The Condition First

The corridor has a window along one side and a courtyard beyond it with three benches nobody sits on, and at four in the afternoon the light comes down it in a way that makes everybody look better than they are.

He is waiting, which is what corridors are for.

A woman he half knows from the church comes along it with somebody new, and she is delighted to see him, and she stops, and she does the introduction.

This is Paul, she says. He has the thing with his spine, you remember I told you.

And then the name.

She is a good person. She has driven him twice. The order of that sentence is not malice and it is not even carelessness exactly, it is the shape the last three years have pressed into everybody, including him, and he knows it is the shape because two weeks ago at a wedding he heard himself do it about himself. I am the one with the back. Then his name.

Fifty-five years old. He stands in a corridor with good light in it and thinks: I have started saying it in that order too.

If you have a word that arrives before your name now, you know it is not the word that hurts. It is the position of it.

He put the name at the front on purpose

Weigh it before anything else, because on this site nothing gets said about God until the thing in the room has been said properly.

What this costs is not dignity in the large sense. Nobody has been cruel. It costs the small thing, which is worse, because the small thing happens forty times a week. It costs the half second of being a person before being a case. It costs the ordinary experience of walking into a room and being introduced with the interesting part first. It cost you three years of gradually agreeing, and now you do it about yourself, at weddings, out loud, before anybody makes you. And it costs the private recognition in a corridor that the demotion was not done to you, it was accepted by you, one polite occasion at a time.

I am not calling any of 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 corridor made lighter before it can be spoken is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, here rather than at the end: if all this has gone past tiredness into something darker, into thinking the people who drive you would have easier lives if they did not have to, tell one living person today. Your doctor, a friend who will sit in a courtyard for an hour, 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 show up.

Now, Isaiah. Written to people in the worst season of their national life, when the word most people would have put in front of their name was exile.

But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.Isaiah 43:1

Read the order of that verse, because the order is the whole message.

Created. Formed. Redeemed. Called by name. Mine.

Not one word about the condition they were in. He does not begin, thus saith the LORD to the exiles. He is speaking into an exile, and He knows precisely what has happened, and He builds the whole sentence out of verbs about who they are to Him and then puts the name at the front where it goes.

You were called by name, and God put nothing in front of it. Isaiah 43:1 says He called thee by thy name and thou art mine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a naming that old and makes it audible in a corridor at four in the afternoon.

There is something else in that verse that a man leaning on a windowsill needs. He says I have called thee by thy name. Not I know your name. Not your name is on a list. Called. Out loud, at you, the way you call somebody across a courtyard.

A name called is a name used. It means somebody is expecting an answer.

You have a name that God says out loud rather than files, and He was saying it long before anybody rearranged the sentence. That is written in Isaiah 43:1, and His Spirit in you is how a called name gets from a page into a person.

Now let me be exact about what this does not do, because you have had enough encouraging sentences in enough corridors.

It does not remove the condition. Not a syllable about that. It does not predict your spine, it does not hint at your spine, and I am not going to guess at your spine in a confident voice, because what God does with your body is His, in His own way, and pretending otherwise would make me one more person in that corridor saying a comfortable thing.

The condition is real and it is going to be in the introduction next week too, most likely, because people say what they have been given to say.

What this settles is the order. Not what gets mentioned. What comes first, in the only account where the order was decided by somebody who cannot be embarrassed and does not need shorthand.

You are named first in the one sentence that was not written by a person in a hurry. The word says He created you and formed you and redeemed you and called you by your name, and the same Spirit who carries that is the one who lets you hear it as your own.