I Have Been Three Times And I Do Not Know The Rules

She sits in the back row, on the end, and she has worked out roughly when to stand up by watching the woman in front of her.

Three Sundays. She has not told anybody why she started coming, and nobody has pressed her, which she is grateful for and also finds slightly unnerving.

There is a great deal she does not know. She does not know what the thing at the front is called. She does not know whether the people who go up there have been invited personally or whether anyone can, or whether there is some level of belonging you reach first that everybody else can see and she cannot. She does not know whether it would be rude, or presumptuous, or simply obvious, for somebody who has been three times to walk up.

So she has not asked anybody, because asking would identify her as somebody who does not know, and she does not have enough footing yet to be identified as anything.

And she wants something. That is the part she has not said out loud even in her own kitchen. She did not start coming for the architecture. There is a specific thing she is carrying, and she is carrying it into that building every Sunday and back out again untouched, because she cannot read the rules well enough to put it down.

If you are new enough to be watching the woman in front of you, stand on the step with us a minute. Nothing about that room or the people who move easily in it is going to be criticized here.

Nobody has set an entrance requirement

Let us name the thing standing between her and asking, because it is not what it looks like.

It looks like ignorance of a procedure. It is not. Every procedure in that building could be explained to her in four minutes by anyone she asked, and half of them would be delighted.

What is actually standing there is a belief that access is graded: that there is an amount of belonging you accumulate first, and that until you have it, asking God for something in that room would be reaching above your place. Nobody in that congregation told her that. It came in with her.

You are not standing outside the door of that building. Nothing about three Sundays and unfamiliar customs has ever graded your access to God. I am not saying that to be welcoming. The written word says now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19), which is a statement about status rather than about familiarity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a woman on the end of a back row.

The verse is about standing, not about tenure

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody who has been there forty years.

Read the two categories that verse cancels, because they are precisely the two she has been living in.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Strangers and foreigners. One is a person nobody knows, the other is a person from outside the arrangement, and she is currently sure she is both.

The verse does not say they will stop being those things once they learn the customs. It says they are no more those things, already, and it puts them in a household, which is not a place where you earn a chair by attendance.

You are inside the household by the standing He gave you, and Scripture states that as done rather than as pending. That is written into the sentence itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman on her third Sunday still watching for when to stand.

Nothing here is against that room or the people in it

Something has to be said plainly, or this becomes a suspicious page about a congregation that has done nothing wrong.

They are not gatekeeping her. Nobody in that building has drawn a line she has to cross, the people who walk to the front are not a class above the ones who do not, and what happens there is real. Nobody has been unkind to her once in three weeks, and the not pressing is a kindness rather than a snub.

The relief is not that the room is less than it appears.

You can ask from the back row, and asking there takes nothing off one person who moves freely in that building. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him (Psalm 145:18), where nearness is His position and no length of attendance is attached to it, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a knowledge of the customs, who carries what a woman asks.

And if the thing you are carrying in and out has become heavier than you can hold, if sleep has gone, if you are frightened, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.