The Stake Was Already in the Ground

Assignment morning at the community garden is eight o'clock, and by five past eight there are already forty people standing around a folding table with a coffee urn on it that somebody's church loaned out.

Rosalind has been driving past this lot for six years. It used to be a filling station. Now it is forty plots laid out in a grid, with a gravel path down the middle and a hose bib at each end, and this is the first year she has come.

She has a plan for how to ask. She has practiced it in the car. She is going to wait until the crowd thins, and then she is going to say to whoever is in charge that she does not need much, and if there is anything left over at the end, a corner, a half, anything nobody wanted, she would take it and she would not be any trouble.

That is the whole speech. She is fifty-eight years old and she has given some version of it in a lot of rooms.

The crowd does not thin. A man in a fluorescent vest climbs onto a milk crate and says good morning, everybody find your stake.

And people scatter into the grid, and Rosalind stands still, because that instruction was not for her.

A girl of maybe eleven, holding a clipboard, walks up and asks her name. Rosalind gives it. The girl runs her finger down the page, says row four, and points.

Row four, third plot in, there is a wooden stake driven into the dirt. On it, in black marker, in handwriting that is not hers and not the girl's, is her name. Spelled right. Both parts.

She has not signed anything. She came to ask about leftovers.

That is where you live too.

You have a version of that speech. Maybe you have never said it out loud, but you have carried it into every room where something good was being handed out: the small ask, the pre-apology, the careful lowering of what you will admit to wanting so that nobody has to be the one to tell you no. And underneath it is the thing you are sure of, which is that whatever place you end up with will be the one nobody else took.

You are not standing here on leftovers, and you were not slipped in at the end. Scripture says the choosing came first and came from God's side, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a thing a person can actually stand on instead of a thing they hope is true.

Nobody in the room chose Him first

Jesus says this on the last night, in an upstairs room, to a group of men who are about to do very badly.

You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He may give it to you.John 15:16

Every you in that sentence is plural. He is not leaning across the table to one man. He is speaking to a company, all of them at once, and He is telling them the order things happened in.

That is the whole weight of it, and it is worth slowing down for. He does not say you chose well. He does not say you chose Me and I am glad you did. He says the choosing ran the other direction and it ran that way first.

You were chosen inside a company before there was anything about you to assess, and that is finished. That is written in John 15 and the same order holds all the way through Scripture, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence spoken in an upstairs room and makes it stand up in a gravel lot on a Saturday morning.

And I want to say plainly what that company is, because the words the Bible uses for it get shrunk down and the shrinking causes real trouble.

When Scripture calls the church the bride of Christ, it is talking about a whole people at once. A body. A nation of ordinary people. It is not a private romance between Christ and one reader, and if that framing has ever made you uneasy, hold on to that. The choosing here is of a company, and your inclusion is a fact about that company rather than a verdict about you.

There was no audition, so stop preparing for one

Here is the part I most want to put in your hands, because I think you have been rehearsing.

If the choosing came first, then nothing you brought was the reason, which means nothing you failed to bring is the reason either. Those two sentences are the same sentence. You cannot keep the second one and get rid of the first.

The men in that room denied Him, argued about rank, fell asleep on Him, and ran. The choosing had already happened. It did not get withdrawn and re-issued on better behavior.

You are inside a choosing that was never an audition, and it does not get reopened. Scripture says He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, and that us is plural on the page and stays plural, and the Holy Spirit is the deposit God gave to guarantee it rather than a grade issued for a performance.

And look at what the stake in the dirt actually proves. It does not prove Rosalind impressed anybody. Nobody at that garden had ever met her. It proves that somebody sat down with a map of forty plots and a list of names and wrote them out at a kitchen table in February, before a single person showed up in the gravel. The stake is evidence about the planner, not about her.

What the plot is for

There is a second half of that verse and it is not decoration.

He chose them and appointed them to go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain. A plot is not a trophy. It is dirt, and dirt is for growing things, and the growing is meant to outlast the season.

That is not a bill arriving after the gift. It is what the gift is. Nobody hands out garden plots so that forty people can stand and look at them.

You have ground given to you inside this company, and it was handed over on purpose. That is written into the same verse that says you did not do the choosing, and it is the Holy Spirit who grows anything that ever comes up out of it, which is why the fruit is never the fee.