The Towels Were Laid Out First

Baptism Sunday at the country church starts at quarter past seven in the morning, and almost nobody knows that, because by the time the cars come up the gravel the whole thing is already done.

Delmer opens the side door with his hip because his hands are full. Eleven white robes over one arm, laundered Tuesday, pressed Thursday, folded so the shoulders sit square. Eleven towels, the good thick ones, not the ones from the kitchen. He sets them on the trestle table by the door in two stacks and squares off the edges with the side of his hand, which he does every time and could not tell you why.

Ada is in the kitchen because Ada is always in the kitchen. Forty years of coffee urns and the second oven that has to be watched. She comes out with the tin of sugar and she stops, because the stacks are on the table and the sign-up sheet is beside them and there are four names on it.

"Delmer. There's four names."

"There is."

"You brought eleven."

He straightened the top towel. "We always bring eleven. Whether or not."

She has been in that building longer than he has. She was there when the roof went. She has washed more dishes in that kitchen than anybody living. And she has never once written her name on that sheet, because Ada keeps a list, and the list is about herself, and every item on it has to come off before she could stand out there in the water in front of people who would then have to pretend they had not noticed the things on the list.

"Whether or not," she said.

"Whether or not," said Delmer, and went back out for the folding chairs.

If you have your own version of that list, you know what she was looking at on that table. You are inside a company whose getting ready is somebody else's work, and it was already under way before anything of yours was fixed. Scripture puts the preparing of God's people in His own hands and not in theirs, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it out in a person, at His pace, on His terms.

The preparing is His and it was never your project

Take the plain shape of it before anything else, because on this site the subject is a company and never a private feeling.

The bride in Scripture is the church. A whole people, gathered out of every century and every kind of town, spoken of as one because Christ committed Himself to all of it at once. And when Scripture speaks of that people being made ready, the readiness is described as something done to them and never as a standard they cleared. You are inside that people, and the preparing of it is not your project to finish. That is written all through the letters, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the actual work in a person rather than the person doing it and hoping He signs off.

Here is Paul, at the very end of a letter, praying it over a whole congregation.

Now may the God of peace Himself set you apart completely, and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.1 Thessalonians 5:23

Notice the word Himself. Paul puts it in on purpose, and it is doing the heaviest lifting in the sentence. Not may you set yourselves apart. Not may you get on top of the list. May the God of peace Himself do it. You are being made ready by the God of peace, and that is already in hand. It is written into the verb of that prayer, and the Holy Spirit is the one at work in the middle of a woman who has been standing in a church kitchen for forty years thinking she was the one holding up the process.

And read the next line, because Paul knew exactly what a congregation does with a prayer like that. He says the one who calls you is faithful, and He does it. Not you. He.

What is actually on the list

I want to say something plain about the list, and I want to say it gently, because the people who keep one are almost always the most conscientious people in the building.

The list is not a moral failing. It is usually a sincere attempt to take God seriously. Somewhere along the way a good person heard that God is holy, which is true, and concluded that the line for holiness starts with them getting themselves respectable, which is not.

But watch what the list does over time. It never gets shorter. The items change and the count stays the same, because the standard is not a fixed height, it is a feeling, and a feeling cannot be cleared. So the sheet stays unsigned for forty years, not because anybody barred the door, but because the person keeping the list has appointed herself both the applicant and the inspector.

You are not the inspector here, and you were never given that job. The word says God Himself sets His people apart and keeps them, and His Spirit is the one who does that work from the inside, which means the file was never yours to sign off on.

Nobody who feels unready has thereby discovered something true about where they stand. Feeling unready is what a conscientious person feels. It is not a reading off an instrument.

You have a standing in this that your list never established and cannot revoke. Scripture puts it in the hands of the God of peace, and the same Spirit who began it in a whole people is the one keeping it.