Together Is The Word That Carries It

The chairs have been pushed to the walls, which is what happens about forty minutes in, and there are more people than the room was built for and the windows are open onto the street.

Somebody's baby is asleep through all of it on a coat.

She is thirty-six.

She loves this. That has to be said first, because it is true and because it makes the rest of it worse. She loves the noise and the singing and the woman on the second row who cannot hold a note and does not care.

And she stands at the side with her hands up and she is in it, and she is also somewhere else, doing the thing she has done for about eighteen months.

Which is: there is a circle, and I am not in it.

Not because anybody excluded her. That is the thing she would want understood. Nobody has done anything. It is that the shape of what she carries is not the shape of what anybody around her carries, and so every ordinary conversation about ordinary Christian life happens in a language that describes a life she cannot have, and she has stopped trying to translate.

They have things that are hard. She knows that. Everyone in that room has something. But there is a specific thing that happens when your particular kind of hard has no company in the building, and what happens is that you slowly move to the side of the room.

If you have moved to the side of your own room, you know nobody put you there, and you know how long it took.

Together is the last word in the sentence and it is doing the work

Weigh it first and at full size, because on this site the honest paragraph runs before the good one and it never gets trimmed.

What this costs is not the room, which you love. It is the language. It costs you the ability to be talked about accurately in the place you belong to, which is a thing everybody else in there has without noticing. It costs eighteen months of translation, and then the day you gave up translating. It costs you every ordinary conversation about ordinary Christian life. And it costs you the side of the room, which nobody assigned you and which you walked to yourself, one Sunday at a time.

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 eighteen months made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if standing at the side has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking this room would run more freely without you in it, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the woman on the second row who cannot hold a note, 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 hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who come and stand at the side with you.

Now, Romans 8, and read the last word of the verse, because that is where the whole thing turns.

And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.Romans 8:17

Glorified together.

Paul could have stopped one word earlier. Glorified would have been enough, and it would have been true, and nobody would ever have noticed the missing word.

He adds together. And it is the same construction he has already used twice in that sentence: joint-heirs, suffer with, glorified together. Three times in one verse he refuses to let the reader be on their own.

You are inside a verse that will not let anybody be alone in it. Romans 8:17 says glorified together and puts the word joint in front of heirs, and the Holy Spirit is named eight verses later as the one who bears witness that you are a child.

Now, who the together is with. Read it again: joint-heirs with Christ, suffer with him, glorified together. The first companion named in that sentence is not the woman on the second row. It is Christ. The togetherness Paul is building is not primarily a togetherness with people whose experience matches yours.

Which matters enormously for somebody standing at the side of a room. The company you have been unable to find among people who understand is not the company the verse is offering. It is offering a with that does not depend on anybody in the building having the same shape of hard.

You have a with that was never conditional on somebody in that room recognizing your kind of hard. That is written into Romans 8:17, and His Spirit in you is the one who bears witness to it directly rather than through a conversation.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because eighteen months of good things have already been said in that building.

It does not tell you the suffering is going. Nothing here predicts your body or your circumstances, and I will not, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not explain the suffering. Paul does not, in that verse, offer a reason for it or a purpose in it, and neither does this site. If so be that we suffer with him is a statement about company, not about cause, and turning it into a cause is how people get hurt in rooms like that one.

And it does not tell you to translate harder. You have done eighteen months of that and it did not work, and the verse does not ask for a nineteenth.

You were never outside a togetherness whose first term is Christ. Scripture uses the with three times in one line, and the same Spirit who witnesses with your spirit is the one who carries it to the side of a full room.