The Suits Were On the Rack

Curtis worked on the speech for four days.

Not on paper. In the truck, on the way to the storage unit and back, out loud, the way a man practices a thing he is dreading. It went about ninety seconds and it covered the eighteen months, and the reason for the eighteen months, and the part where he wanted to be clear that he was not making excuses, and then a closing line about being ready to work that he could never get to sound like anything but a man begging.

The job fair is in the basement of a shelter on the near south side, in a room with a low ceiling and folding chairs stacked along one wall and a coffee urn that somebody keeps refilling from a pitcher.

He gets there at ten. There is a line, but it is not the line he expected, because it is not a line for the tables. It is a line for two barber chairs set up under the window, and a sign made out of a piece of poster board leaning against the leg of the table.

A woman with a clipboard tells him haircuts first, then the rack, then the tables, in that order, honey, everybody does it in that order.

So Curtis, holding his ninety seconds, sits down in a barber chair.

The barber is about seventy and does not say much, and works the way men worked when they learned a trade. He does the back of Curtis's neck with a hot towel. Nobody has done anything to the back of Curtis's neck with a hot towel in eleven years.

Then the rack.

It runs the whole length of the far wall on a rented garment rail, and it is not a jumble. It is sorted. Somebody has put paper tags on the rail, in marker, going up in sizes, and under each tag the jackets hang facing the same direction with the trousers folded over the hanger bar.

A volunteer, a heavy set man in a cardigan with a tape measure around his neck, looks at Curtis for about two seconds and says, forty two long, and walks straight to the forty twos, and pulls out a charcoal one, and holds it up by the shoulders.

And Curtis stands there with a haircut and a suit jacket held up in front of him and ninety seconds of explanation still sitting in his mouth with nowhere to go.

Nobody asked him for it. Nobody in that room was waiting to hear the reason for the eighteen months. The suits were on the rack before he came down the stairs, in his size, hung facing the same way, because somebody had sorted them for whoever walked in.

That is the room you have been avoiding.

You have a speech too. Maybe not about a resume. Maybe it is about the years you were gone, or the thing you did, or the thing you cannot seem to stop doing, or a temper, or a habit, or a marriage that did not make it, and you have been carrying a version of it for so long that you no longer notice you are rehearsing. And underneath the speech is a plan: you are going to get the thing fixed, and then you are going to walk in. You are already inside the company God has been getting ready, and the getting ready was never handed to you as an assignment. That is what Scripture says about it, plainly, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work in a people rather than a man doing it to himself in a truck.

Nobody asked for the speech

Let me put the site's whole subject in plain words before anything else, because it changes the size of everything that follows.

When Scripture calls anybody the bride, it means the church. A whole people. It is corporate language: a company, a household, a city, a body, a nation called God's own. It is not about a private romance between Christ and one reader, and if that framing has ever sat wrong with you, keep the instinct, because the Bible is using the bigger word. Everything below is about a people being dressed, not about a person being courted.

Now hear the verse, and listen for who is talking.

I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.Isaiah 61:10

The one speaking there is not a woman in love. It is Zion. A city. A whole people with walls and gates and streets and a population, singing about what has been done to her, and the two pictures at the end of the verse are pictures about clothing, not about romance. Isaiah reaches for a wedding day for one reason: it is the day everybody in the ancient world understood as the day you are dressed better than you have ever been dressed in your life, and it is not a day you dress yourself.

Read the verbs. He hath clothed me. He hath covered me. Both of them past tense and both of them His. Zion is not describing an outfit she assembled. She is describing what was put on her.

You are covered by something that was handed to you already finished, and none of the sewing was yours. That is written in the plainest verbs Hebrew has, and the same Spirit who put that song in a prophet's mouth is the one who makes it true in a company of people who came in off the street.

The rack was sorted before anybody came down the stairs

Here is what I want you to see about that basement, because it is the whole doctrine in one room.

Somebody sorted the suits. Before the doors opened. By size, on tags, in marker, jackets facing the same direction. That sorting is not a response to Curtis. It happened while Curtis was in his truck practicing his ninety seconds. It would have happened if he had never come.

And that is what the word ready actually means here. Not a state Curtis achieved. A condition of the room he walked into.

You are standing inside a readiness that is a fact about the room, and it is not a verdict anybody has passed on you. The word says Christ gave Himself for the church that He might sanctify and cleanse it, the sanctifying being His verb and the church being the object of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that out in a whole people while a man is still in the parking lot.

This is where I have to be careful with you, because there is a version of Christian teaching that turns getting ready into a checklist and then quietly grades you on it, and you have probably been graded that way, possibly by yourself, for a long time. I am not going to hand you a list. There is no list in this. You have not been placed on probation, and there is no standard you are failing to reach on the way in. His word says He is at work in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, which puts the working in His hands rather than yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who does it, in a whole company, at a pace He is not in a hurry about.

And notice, please, what the feeling of being unready is actually evidence of. It is evidence that you take the room seriously. It is not evidence about your standing in it. Those are two entirely different things and almost everybody who feels the first one concludes the second.

You are not being kept at the door until something in you improves. The word says while we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly, which is a sentence written specifically to remove the waiting period, and it is His Spirit who applies it to a man who has spent years assuming there is one.