Names Written Inside the Cover

The shoebox came out of his mother's closet the week after the move, and Idris has been carrying it from room to room for three days without opening it.

Tonight he opens it on the kitchen table with the good lamp pulled over.

There is a hymnal in it. Small, dark green cloth going gray at the corners, the spine repaired twice with two different tapes from two different decades, the second repair done carefully by somebody with a steady hand and the first one done in a hurry.

He opens the front cover, and there they are.

Four names, in four different hands, running down the inside board.

The top one is in ink that has gone brown, sloped and formal, a man who learned to write in another country. Under it a rounder hand in blue, a woman's, with a small flourish on the last letter that Idris recognizes from the back of every photograph in the box. Then his mother's, in the ballpoint she used for everything, list, check, note on the refrigerator, name in a book.

And then his own, in pencil, in handwriting that is not his, because he was six and somebody else wrote it for him.

He sits with that for a while.

Because he knows the rest of it. He knows that the congregation this book came out of came apart. He does not know the whole of what happened and nobody who could tell him properly is alive, but he knows there were two sides and that people who had eaten in each other's houses for twenty years stopped speaking, and he knows his grandmother walked out of that building and never went into another one anywhere, not once, for forty-one years.

He knows his mother tried a church for a while when he was small, and then did not.

And he knows this book crossed an ocean in a trunk, and crossed a country in a car, and went into three different closets in three different cities, and got taped twice, and got his name written in it in pencil by somebody who had every reason to stop bothering.

He turns the cover a little toward the lamp.

Under his name there is still half a page of blank board. Nobody ruled it off. Nobody wrote THE END.

You have a version of that book, and it may not be a book.

It might be a first name you were given for somebody, or the fact that you know the tune of something you were never taught, or a phrase your grandmother used that turns out to be a line of Scripture. Whatever it is, it survived people who let go, and you have never known what to do with that, because the people letting go is the part of the story you have the most evidence for. You are inside a company Christ has held on to through every one of those years, and He was not holding on loosely. Scripture says God does not forget His people even when the closest human bond might, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept a taped book moving through three closets and put it in your hands tonight.

He did not let go of the house when the house let go of each other

Let me be honest with you first, because a message that is not honest here is worth nothing.

The church has failed people. Not in theory. In rooms, with names, and some of those failures were severe, and some of them happened to people you are related to, and dressing that up would insult you. I am not going to argue about who was right in a split I was not in, and I am not going to defend one tradition or prosecute another. That is not the subject and it never was.

The subject is what Christ did while all of that was going on.

The bride in Scripture is the church, a whole company, and the covenant is kept from His side. That is the thing to see. It is not a private romance and it is not an agreement that stays alive because both parties keep performing. It is a covenant a faithful One made with a people, and the people have been in pieces at various points in every century since, and He has not left.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.Isaiah 49:15

Read what He compares Himself to, and read what He does with the comparison. He picks the strongest bond a human being knows and He says even that one may fail. He does not pretend it never fails. He looks straight at the possibility of the deepest human tie going, and then He puts Himself on the other side of it.

You are held by a faithfulness that already accounted for everybody who let go. That is what is written, in a sentence that names human forgetting out loud before it promises anything, and it is His Spirit who makes an old promise stand up in a kitchen at ten at night. He did not make this promise to a house in good order. He made it to one in exile.

The book kept getting packed

Here is the detail I keep coming back to, and I think it is the whole message in an object.

Somebody packed that book.

After the split. After the year of not speaking. After a woman decided she was done with buildings for the rest of her life, somebody wrapped a small green hymnal in something and put it in a trunk, and then somebody put it in a car, and then somebody put it in a closet, and then somebody wrote a six year old's name in it in pencil.

None of those people were in a congregation at the time. All of them kept the book.

That is not sentiment. That is a thread that did not get cut, and threads that survive forty-one years of somebody's stated intention are not being held by the person holding them.

You were being kept during years when nobody in your family was keeping anything. The word says He does not forget His people, and the same Spirit who wrote that sentence is the one who kept a small green book moving toward a kitchen table you had not been born for yet.

And I want to say the careful thing here, because this is where a message like this goes wrong. This does not mean the harm did not matter. It mattered. God is not indifferent to what was done in rooms with His name over the door, and Scripture is harder on that than anybody reading this would dare to be.

You are inside a covenant that survived what was done to it, and its survival was never resting on the people who broke it. That is written into the whole shape of the prophets, and His Spirit is the one who carries it, and He has never once made the keeping of it depend on the behavior of a congregation in one town in one decade.