We Divided Over Unity

Ruth is at the lights on the ring road with her grandson in the back, and he asks her a question that takes her about four hundred yards to fail to answer.

They have just gone past two buildings. Red brick, both of them. Both set back off the road with a bit of grass in front. One has a hall on the side and one does not. Their names are so nearly identical that a stranger reading the boards would assume it was the same outfit with two doors.

Charlie is ten. He does not have an agenda, he is not being funny, and he has never once been to either.

He says, "Nan, why are there two?"

And Ruth opens her mouth and out comes the beginning of a sentence she has been saying her entire adult life.

"Well, back in the day there was a disagreement about..."

And she hears it.

She is halfway through the word disagreement, and she hears her own voice doing what it has always done, which is to set the reason gently down somewhere else. Somewhere off to one side. In a decade, in a committee, in a group of people who were mostly dead before she was born.

She stops.

She actually stops, mid-sentence, at the lights, with the indicator going, and Charlie waits about three seconds and then says, "Nan?"

And what she wants to say and cannot get out of her mouth is not complicated. It is nine words long. She could say it before the lights change if she could make herself.

We were the people who said there should not be two.

That is the thing. That is the entire thing. Not a footnote about it, not a version with the sharp bits filed off. Her family, her lot, her grandfather with the same Bible she still has in the front room, were the people who looked at a Christian world full of walls and said we will not have a single one of them, no creed but Christ, one family, a table open every week that nobody gets kept away from.

That was the fire. It was a good fire. She would light it again tomorrow.

And there are two red brick buildings four hundred yards apart on the ring road.

The lights change. She says, "It is a long story, love," and drives on, and Charlie goes back to his game, and Ruth's hands are at ten to two on the wheel and something in her chest is sitting very still.

She has been starting that sentence with the word well for about forty years.

Say it with nothing on the end of it

I am inside this too. So is whoever handed you this. That is the only reason any of what follows is allowed to be said, and I want you to know I am not standing outside a window looking in at somebody else's family.

We set out to end division, and we divided.

Not once. Several times, over the course of about a century, and the arguments were sincere and the people on every side of them loved Jesus and believed they were holding the line for the very thing that was being lost. I am not going to hand you a villain. There is not one. That is precisely what makes it heavy: nobody here gets to be the reason, which means nobody gets to be relieved of it either.

And the impulse was right. I want to be as clear about that as I am about the rest of it. A family that says the table is open every week and the confession is Him and not a list, and that nobody is kept outside over a word, has hold of something Jesus Himself prayed for out loud on the last night of His life. He asked that they would all be one. That is not a slogan somebody invented in a barn on the frontier. It is the Lord's own request, and the people who chased it were chasing the right thing.

The fire was right. The outcome was human.

Both of those are true at once, and holding both is not a contradiction you have to resolve. It is just what it is like to be in a family.

Now here is the part I actually want to give you, and it comes from a man who knew exactly what it cost to keep his mouth shut.

When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me, and my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then I made my sin known to you, and I did not cover up my guilt. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin.Psalm 32:3

Look at what actually wore him down.

It was not the thing. It was the silence about the thing.

The bones did not waste away because of what had happened. They wasted away in the keeping quiet, in the daily low-level effort of holding a sentence half said, and the moment the sentence came out whole, the weight went. Not because a case had been won. Nobody was found guilty and nobody was proved right. He simply stopped covering it.

And that is what your explanation has been doing to you for forty years.

Every time you start with the word well, you are picking the weight back up. That little run-up, that gentle placing of the reason somewhere else, in a decade or a committee or among people safely dead, is not dishonest and I am not accusing you of anything. It is a kindness you have been extending to your own family for four decades, and Scripture never once asked it of you, and His Spirit has been carrying the bag beside you the whole way.

It costs about the same as carrying a bag of sand up a hill every single time somebody asks you a simple question.

You are in Christ, and so are the people in the other building, and neither of those two facts is being adjudicated by anybody today. You do not have to work out who was right in order to say what happened. Those are two different jobs, and the second one has been waiting on the first one for a hundred years, and it never needed to. Scripture never made the one wait on the other, and His Spirit is the one who holds a person while they say it.