My Name Is Still on the List

The newsletter comes every month and he does not know how to stop it and has not tried very hard.

Ernesto is fifty-five. He stopped going seven years ago and he moved house twice in that time, and it followed him both times, which means somebody has been updating a record with his address in it.

He reads it. All of it, every month, standing by the bin.

And on the back page there is the rota for the coming month, and the list of people who do the readings, and there is a general list of members further down that they print twice a year in a smaller font.

And he is on it.

Seven years. His name, spelled correctly, with the initial of his middle name, which almost nobody uses and which is on his baptism certificate.

He has not been able to work out what he feels about it and it is not gratitude.

The closest he has got, standing by that bin, is that it feels like being owed something he does not want to collect. Or like a coat left on the back of a chair in a restaurant that closed.

He has thought twice about ringing to ask them to take him off.

He has not, and the reason he has not is the reason this article exists: he cannot be the one who does it. If they take him off, that will be a thing that happened. If he asks them to take him off, that will be a thing he did.

And so it goes on, every month, by the bin.

In February the newsletter had a paragraph about somebody's ninetieth and a photograph, and he recognized four of the six people in it, and he stood there longer than usual, and then he put it in the bin the way he does.

And what he has never said out loud, and would find impossible to say to anybody who knew him, is: I do not want them to take my name off. I want somebody to notice it is still there.

And you may be on a list somewhere. And it may be the one thing you cannot look at properly.

The father sees him while he is still a long way off

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it seven years and it was never yours.

Your name has not been struck off anything. It never was, and no list on a back page has ever been the record that matters. Scripture has a father who sees somebody at a distance, which only happens if he had been looking, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a rota, who keeps a person on record. Set it down here on this road. It is heavy and you have held it by the bin every month for seven years.

Now hear it, and hear the distance.

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.Luke 15:20

While he was still a long way off.

That detail is doing all the work. To see somebody a long way off you have to have been looking down a road, and to be looking down a road you have to have been doing it for a while, and the story does not tell us for how long because it does not need to.

And notice who covers the distance. The son is walking and the father runs, which in that culture was undignified for a man of his age and position, and the text records it without a word of apology.

You have been looked for the whole time. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who has been keeping you on record, and He has never once needed a list to remember anybody.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says that congregation has been neglecting you. Somebody has been updating your address through two house moves, which is not neglect, and it may be a person nobody thinks about doing a small job faithfully for seven years. Scripture calls that a kind of love and His Spirit is the one who keeps a person at it.

And nothing here promises what would happen if you walked in. I will not tell you a room will run down a road, because rooms are made of people and I have not met them, and the running in that story is the Father's.

The point is narrower and it is about that sentence by the bin, and Scripture has a man watching a road, and His Spirit is the one who has kept the watching going.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You want somebody to notice it is still there.

That is not a small or a shameful thing to want, and you have been carrying it for seven years as though it were. It is the exact wish of a man who has not stopped belonging anywhere except in his own account of it. His Spirit is the one who put that wish in you and He has never once been embarrassed by it.