A Coat With a Pin In It

The closet opens at nine and Ruthie has never once been there at nine.

She comes at twenty to twelve. She has her reasons and she has said them out loud so many times that they have gone smooth: the bus, the knee, she does not like a crowd. What is actually true is that at twenty to twelve the rails are picked over and there is nothing left worth wanting, and a woman who takes what is left over cannot be accused of taking somebody else's.

She has done it that way for thirty years, and not only at the clothing closet. At the potluck she waits until the line is done and eats whatever nobody chose. In a waiting room she takes the chair by the door. At Christmas she opens hers last and small, and if anybody says anything she laughs and says she is easy to buy for, which is true, and is not the reason.

So this Saturday she is at the end of the rail at twenty to twelve, going along the hangers with two fingers the way you do when you are not really looking. Windbreakers. A blazer with a shoulder pad in it from a decade nobody wants back. And then the last hanger, on its own, a wool coat in a good dark green, and pinned to the sleeve with a safety pin, an index card, and on the card her name.

Not initials. Her name, spelled right, including the part everybody gets wrong.

She stood there long enough that a young woman came over from the table by the door to see if she was all right.

"That is my name."

"It is. Sue put it aside on Wednesday. She said green, and she said the sleeve would be long enough."

Ruthie said the thing she has been saying her whole life, that somebody must need it more, and she began to unpin the card so that the coat could go back into the general run of things and be fair again.

The young woman put her hand flat on the coat and said, easily, as if it were nothing at all: "There are forty of them back there with cards on. We do everyone. You are just the last one to come in."

Whatever you have been doing to make sure you never take up more room than you were allotted, you know how loud that sentence would land. You are inside a company that was clothed on purpose, and your name went on the card at the same time as everybody else's. Scripture says God's chosen ones were clothed together, all of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true of a whole people rather than a list of favorites.

The choosing was of a whole household

Take the plain shape of it first, because on this site the subject is always a company and never a private romance.

The bride in Scripture is the church. A people, called out of every kind of household and every century, spoken of as one because Christ committed Himself to the whole of it. When the New Testament says chosen, it is almost always saying it in the plural about that people, and it is saying it about a decision God made, not about a competition anybody entered. You are counted inside that company, and there was no audition to fail. That is what is written about the chosen ones in Colossians, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a scattered people into one body rather than a line at a counter.

Now look at what Paul actually hands them.

Put on then, as God's chosen ones, set apart and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.Colossians 3:12

Read the order. He does not say become chosen and then dress accordingly. He says put these on, as God's chosen ones, which is a description of the people he is writing to before he asks them for anything. The status is the ground and the clothing is what stands on it. You were already the thing he calls you before the sentence got to the instruction, and it is already settled about you. That is written into the grammar of the verse itself, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence land on a woman who has spent thirty years at the end of a rail.

And every garment in that list is the sort of thing a person wears among other people. Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience. You cannot be patient on your own in a room. He is dressing a household, not an individual, and the dressing assumes the household is already gathered.

What taking the leftovers is really saying

Here is the hard, kind thing, and I say it as somebody who has watched good people do it for years.

Taking what is left over looks like humility and it is often something else. It is a way of never being told no. If you never reach for the good coat, nobody can hand it to somebody else in front of you. If you are last by policy, then being last is not a verdict, it is a plan. That is not modesty. It is a small quiet insurance policy against being unwanted, and it costs a great deal to run.

But look at what it does to the truth. God says His people were chosen, and a person who will only take leftovers has to hold that at arm's length, because a leftover cannot be a chosen thing. So the whole promise gets received as something meant for other people in the room.

You have been chosen in the plain sense of the word, and you did not get there by being the kind of person somebody picks. Scripture says He chose a people and clothed them, and His Spirit is the one who applies that to the person actually reading it rather than to a general audience. You are set apart and beloved right now, in a hallway, at twenty to twelve.

There is no reason to give for it and you are not required to produce one. That is what makes it a choosing and not a hiring.