A Plate Under Foil

It happens in the grocery store on Cedar, in the produce section, on a Wednesday afternoon, which is the whole problem with grocery stores.

Dominique is picking through the bananas looking for the ones that are not yet a disaster, and a voice behind her says her name with a question mark on the end of it.

Miss Pearl. Seventy-one years old, five foot nothing, has run the kitchen at that church since before Dominique was born, and has a cart with the wheel that everybody in the store fights over.

And Dominique does the thing, the fast internal thing, where you calculate in about a second how this is going to go. Because there are two versions. There is the one where the person is warm and it is worse, and there is the one where the person is careful and it is worse. She has had both. She left three years ago, in March, after a year that took her mother and her job and something else she does not discuss, and she did not leave with a speech. She just stopped coming, and then it had been six weeks, and then it had been too long to explain, and then it was three years.

Miss Pearl says, "You still take the corner piece?"

Dominique says, "Ma'am?"

"The corner piece of the macaroni. With the crust on it. You used to be the only one who wanted the edge and I could never understand it."

And Dominique laughs before she can stop herself, because that is true and nobody has known that about her for three years.

Then Miss Pearl says, in exactly the tone she would use about the weather, "I still fix you one. Every Sunday. Under foil, in the second fridge, name on the tape."

Dominique stands there with a banana in her hand.

"Since when?"

"Since."

And Dominique says, "Miss Pearl, that's three years."

And Miss Pearl says, "I know how long it is." Then she puts her hands back on the cart with the bad wheel, and she says, "I am not asking you anything, baby. I am telling you where your plate is." And she goes off toward the registers, and the wheel is squealing the whole way, and Dominique stands in produce for a while.

Maybe you have your own version of that March. Maybe you did not leave with a speech either, and the not-explaining got heavier the longer it went, until the weight of the explanation was more than the weight of just staying gone. Hear this while you stand in it: you have a place at a gathering that has never once been reassigned, and it is yours today whether or not you do anything about it. That is the written word's position and not a sentiment about churches, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and lets a person actually believe it.

Who is doing the seeking

There is a story in Luke about a man up a tree, and everybody remembers the tree, and almost nobody remembers the sentence at the end of it.

Zacchaeus is a small man with a bad reputation and a good income, and he climbs a sycamore because he cannot see over the crowd. Jesus stops under the branches, looks up, and invites Himself to the man's house. The town is scandalized. And then Jesus says the line that explains the whole afternoon.

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.Luke 19:10

Read the direction of that sentence. He came. He sought. The tree climbing was Zacchaeus, but the seeking was never his.

And this is where I want to name the thing this whole site is about, plainly, so nothing gets misread. When Scripture calls the church a bride, it is a covenant word about a whole people, corporate, across every century and every language. It is not a private romance between one heart and Christ and it never was. He binds Himself to a people, He gathers a people, and He goes out after the ones who are not in the room. You are inside a people He committed Himself to seek, and the seeking has never depended on you being findable. That is Scripture and not a hope about it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the finding work now, in produce sections and parking lots and Wednesday afternoons.

A plate under foil in a second fridge is what that looks like when a people has understood it.

Nobody took your place

Now let me say some things straight, because you have probably been told them crooked.

Nobody was given your place. That is not how a gathering of this kind works. The picture Scripture keeps returning to is a table and a house, and the invitation is issued by the owner, and the owner has not withdrawn it and has not reassigned your seat to somebody more consistent. There is no waiting list. There is no clause about lapsing.

And I am not going to tell you that your three years were wasted. I am not going to tell you they were a lesson either, because that is the same insult in a devotional voice. They were three years. You lived them and you got through a March that took more from you than most people know, and God was not absent from a single week of it whether or not you could feel Him.

You were being sought during the whole stretch you thought you had gone quiet. The word says the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost, in the present-tense reality of what He is like, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that seeking going long after a person has stopped expecting it.

And I am not going to end this article by telling you where to go on Sunday. That is not my business and it is not the point. Some of you have a building you could walk into next week and some of you have real reasons why that particular building is not the one, and sorting that out is a different conversation with wiser people than a webpage. You are invited, and the invitation is stated today, not negotiated. That is written into the character of the God who seeks, and the Holy Spirit is not applying pressure to you while you read this, whatever pressure you have known from other rooms.