The Address Stayed On the List

Wendell called the church office on a Tuesday morning nine years ago and asked to be taken off the list.

He was polite about it. He is a polite man. He said there had been a business with the building fund and he did not want to go into it, and that he would rather not receive the newsletter any more, and the woman on the phone said all right and wrote it down and did not argue with him, which he had been braced for and which he found, afterward, worse.

Nine Novembers since. A basket comes every one of them. Squash, rolls, a pie in a foil pan with a rubber band around the top, a jar of something with a handwritten label. Twice he carried it back down to the church himself and left it inside the door and drove home. The other seven he ate.

This year he heard the storm door before the knock and got there fast, because he had decided he was going to say something.

Young man on the step. Box against his hip.

"I asked to come off the list."

"You did. Nine years ago in November." The young man shifted the box. "You came off the newsletter. This is Ruby's list."

"What is Ruby's list?"

"Ruby copies the addresses out longhand every fall. Same notebook, she just adds and crosses through. She said you asked to come off the roll and that was your business and she was not going to argue with a man about his own business. She said the basket list is hers."

Wendell stood there with the storm door open against his shoulder and the cold coming in around his knees.

"Where do you want it," the young man said. "It has got the pie on top so it does not want turning."

If you have ever taken yourself off something, you know what he was doing on that step: trying to work out whether it was an error, and whether he was allowed. You are still invited right now, and nothing about your place got reassigned while you were gone. Scripture puts a shepherd out in the open country going after what is his, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that story land on the person who has counted himself out of it.

He counts by ownership, not by attendance

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

The bride in Scripture is the church. A whole people, out of every century and every county, spoken of as one because Christ committed Himself to all of it together. So when the New Testament speaks of a flock, it is speaking of that people, and the arithmetic of a flock is worth slowing down over. You are one of a hundred that a shepherd counts as his own, and that is already settled about you. That is what the written parable says, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old story about sheep say anything at all to a man on a porch in November.

What man among you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?Luke 15:4

Read the possessive. Having a hundred sheep. He has a hundred, and one of them is out, and he still has a hundred. The count never changes. The sheep in the brush is not a former sheep, or an applicant sheep, or a sheep on probation. It is one of his hundred, in the wrong place.

That is the whole hinge of the parable and it is easy to walk past. The searching does not create the belonging. The belonging is why there is a search. You were his before anyone went out looking, and it is already yours. That is written into the first clause of the verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies a possessive pronoun to a man who has been assuming he was struck through in a ledger somewhere.

And notice what sets the length of the search. Not a season. Not a policy. Until he finds it. The clock in that sentence runs on the finding, and there is no other number in it anywhere.

Two lists, and only one of them is a roll

I want to be careful here, because a man like Wendell has had people be careless with him before.

There was a real business with the building fund. I do not know what it was and I am not going to defend it or prosecute it, and I am certainly not going to tell you what to do about a building on a Sunday morning. That is between you and God and it is not what this article is for.

What I want you to see is the difference between the two lists on that step. One of them is a roll: a record of who is currently receiving the newsletter, kept in an office, and a man is perfectly entitled to ask to come off it. The other is Ruby's notebook, and Ruby does not keep it by roll. She keeps it by address. She writes yours out again every fall in her own hand because you live at that address, and she is not going to have a conversation with you about whether you qualify.

The invitation of God is the second kind of list. It is not maintained by attendance and it is not withdrawn by absence.

You are invited today, in the present tense, and nobody has to reissue it. The word says the shepherd goes after his own until he finds them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that true in the years when nobody from anywhere is knocking.

And I want to say one more thing plainly, because the enemy of a man in this position is always the arithmetic of wasted time. You are not a case of lost years, and there is nothing here for you to make up. Scripture never once says the shepherd docked the sheep for the distance, and the same Spirit who was at work in you nine Novembers ago has not been idle in the meantime.