They Came Back Folded

The laundry room at the shelter is two machines and a dryer with a bad latch, and a folding table somebody built out of a door and four legs from a different table.

Curtis has been in the house eleven days. He has worn the same gray shirt for all eleven of them.

It is not that the machines are busy. It is that the machines run on a system. You put what you have into a mesh bag, and the bag closes with an elastic band, and on the band there is a strip of masking tape with your name written on it in marker, and you hang the bag on the rail by the door and it comes back to you the next evening.

Which means writing your name on a piece of tape.

Which means somebody, at some point in the process, reading it.

Curtis has stood in the doorway of that room four separate times in eleven days and turned around and gone back up the stairs. He tells himself it is because the shirt is not that bad. It is that bad. He can smell it now in the way you can smell a room you have been sitting in too long, and he has started sitting at the end of the table at supper, and he has started letting people go up the stairs ahead of him, and he has started not raising his hand for anything.

Because here is the thing that has hold of him, and it is not a shirt. Curtis has decided that he will get himself into shape and then he will join in. That is the order of it. Clean first, then belong. He has been running that order his whole adult life and it has never once come out the way he planned it, and it did not come out that way this time either.

On the eleventh evening he comes back from a day of doing nothing in particular, and goes up to the bunk room, and there is a stack on the end of his bed.

The gray shirt, washed and folded flat, with the collar squared.

Under it, two shirts he does not own. A flannel and a plain blue button-down, both his size, both folded the same way, both smelling like the soap they use downstairs.

And on top of the stack, a mesh bag, rolled up, with an elastic band around it. On the band there is a strip of masking tape, and on the tape somebody has printed CURTIS in black marker.

He never gave anybody his name for that bag.

He stands there holding a warm folded shirt in both hands, and he cannot put it on, and he could not tell you why. He is fifty-one years old and there is a stack of clean clothes on his bed with his name on it and he is standing in the middle of a bunk room with his arms full, unable to move.

You may not have a shelter. But you have a shirt.

You have one thing about yourself that you have decided is the thing standing between you and walking all the way into a room. You know exactly what it is. And you have been running the same order Curtis runs: fix it, then belong. And you have been running it for years.

You are already inside the company God is preparing, and the preparing is His work rather than yours. That is what Scripture says about the church from one end to the other, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your progress on your own repair list, who has been doing it in you since before you noticed.

Nobody asked Joshua to wash first

There is a scene in Zechariah that I have never gotten over, and it is the one this whole message is standing on.

A man named Joshua is on his feet in front of the angel of the Lord. He is not a private citizen. He is the high priest, which means he is standing there on behalf of a whole nation just back from exile, and whatever is true of him in that room is true of all of them. And the text says he is wearing filthy garments. Not stained. The word is as bad a word as the Hebrew has.

There is an accuser standing at his right hand, doing the only job an accuser has, which is to read the list out loud.

And here is what happens, and it is not what a religious person expects.

Take off his filthy garments. And to him he said, See, I have taken away your guilt, and I am clothing you with fine robes.Zechariah 3:4

Nobody says go and wash. Nobody hands him a basin. Nobody gives him six weeks and a program. The garments come off him by an order given over his head to other people in the room, and clean ones go on him, and the whole transaction happens while he is standing there with nothing to contribute but his body.

You are covered by a change of clothes you did not pay for and were not asked to earn. Scripture puts the removing and the robing both on God in that scene, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a courtroom that old and stands a person in it today.

And remember who he is standing for. This is not a private favor done to one priest. This is a whole people being told what their standing is, in the person of the man who represents them. That is who the church is, and I want to say it plainly here rather than leave it to be guessed at: the church is a people, the entire company of everyone who belongs to Christ, in every century and on every continent. Not a private arrangement between Christ and one reader. What is done in that scene is done to a company, and everyone in the company is covered by it.

You are dressed in what Christ provided, and you were dressed in it before you managed one thing about yourself. The written word says He gave Himself for the church to present her to Himself, His doing and not hers, and His Spirit is the one who works that reality down into a person who is still standing in a doorway holding a mesh bag.

The preparing is not your project

Now let me take the checklist off the table, because somebody has probably handed you one.

There is a way of teaching readiness that turns a person into a project with a manager, and the manager is the person. Get this fixed. Get that under control. Then you can serve, then you can speak, then you can sit somewhere other than the end of the table. It sounds like diligence and it functions like a locked door, and it has kept more good people out of rooms than any doctrine ever has.

You are not being graded, and there is no line you are underneath. Scripture puts the whole preparing of the church in God's hands from start to finish, the beginning of it and the completing of it both, and the Holy Spirit is named as the one carrying that work rather than a person's willpower on a Tuesday morning.

And notice what that does to the order of things. Curtis had it as clean first, then belong. The stack on the bed had it the other way around: he belonged, therefore there were shirts. Somebody had been watching him at supper for eleven days and had written his name on a piece of tape without being asked, because he was in the house, and being in the house was the whole of the qualification.

You have a place in the house first, and everything else in you is being worked on from inside it. That is written into the way God dealt with His people from the beginning, rescue and then instruction, and His Spirit is the one keeping that order straight in someone who keeps reversing it.

If you feel unready, that feeling is honest. It is not, however, a report on your standing. A man in a bunk room with clean clothes in his arms feels exactly as unready as he did an hour before, and the clean clothes are on the bed either way.