The Laminated Alphabet Strip

The pencil is too small for his hand. He holds it the way he holds a screwdriver, in a fist, and the tutor has stopped correcting it because the letters come out fine that way and she has learned to leave a man his grip.

Tuesday nights, the small room at the back of the library, six of them at a table built for children. A laminated strip is taped along the top edge of his desk, capitals above, small letters below, a picture beside each one for anyone who does not know the sound yet. He is fifty-eight. The woman beside him is nineteen and came from a country where the letters go the other way. The man across from him drives a forklift and has hidden it from his employer for thirty years by memorizing the labels. Nobody in this room is stupid. He knows that. It does not stop the thing that happens in his chest every time he sounds out a word that his grandson read at six.

Tonight the word is bread. He gets the b, and the r, and then the two vowels together do the thing vowels do, and the tutor waits, and he gets there. Bread. She smiles and moves on, and he sits with the word and does the sum he always does. Fifty-two years. Fifty-two years of menus he did not read and letters he handed to his wife and forms he signed where the man pointed. He does not do the sum to punish himself. He does it because it is true, and because nobody else in the room is going to say it.

He came to faith the same year he came to reading. It is the same sum, exactly, and he does it in the same chair. Fifty-eight. Everyone else got this at six. Everyone in that building on a Sunday has had a whole life of it, and he has had a year, and he cannot stop counting what he did not have.

You know that sum. Yours may not be reading, and your number may not be fifty-eight, but you came late to something everybody else seems to have been born into, and you are grateful, and you are also grieving, and nobody has told you that you are allowed to be both. I am not going to tell you the years did not matter. I am going to take you to a man who asked the exact question you are asking, on the night the new birth was first spoken about, and then to a vineyard at five in the afternoon.

How can a man be born when he is old

The first person ever told about the new birth was not young. He was a teacher of Israel, respectable and established, with a lifetime of religion behind him, and he came at night, and Jesus said to him that a person must be born again. And the first thing out of his mouth was your question. How can a man be born when he is old?

Sit with the fact that the question is in the text. Nicodemus was saying the thing every late-comer says: I have a whole life behind me, the years are what they are, you cannot start a person over at my age. And Jesus did not tell him he was too old. He did not say the offer was for the young, or that the years counted against him, or that a man with that much behind him would have to make up the difference. He said the wind blows where it wills, and you hear its sound, and you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. Everyone. He answered a question about age with a word about wind, and wind does not check the calendar.

Let me stay in the pit with you a moment first, because it is real and it is not a small one. Grieving the years you did not have is not ingratitude. It is honesty. You look up on a Sunday at people who have carried this since childhood, who know the words without the book, and you have a year, and the sum comes on its own. I am not going to tell you the sum is wrong. It is not wrong. The years happened. What I am going to tell you is that the sum is not the verdict, and that God is not the one doing it.

Hear this in the present tense: you have a today, and it was given to you, and it is not a remainder. I am not offering you that as a comfort I made up. It is written in John 3:8 that the Spirit moves on whom He wills, and there is no age in the verse; and the Holy Spirit is the one who was blowing on the night Nicodemus asked, and who is not doing arithmetic on you now.

Five in the afternoon

Jesus told a story about a vineyard, and I want you to notice what time it is in it. The owner goes out at dawn and hires men. He goes out again at nine, at noon, at three. And at five in the afternoon, an hour before the day ends, he finds men still standing in the marketplace.

And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing. And he said to them, "Why do you stand here idle all day?" They said to him, "Because no one has hired us." He said to them, "You go into the vineyard too."Matthew 20:6-7

Read what he does not say. He does not say, it is a bit late for you. He does not ask them to explain the day. He asks one question, and they answer it honestly, nobody hired us, and he sends them into the vineyard. The same vineyard. Not a smaller plot at the edge for the late ones. And when evening comes and the men are paid, the ones hired at five receive the same as the ones hired at dawn, and the dawn men grumble, and the owner says a thing I want you to hear in his voice and not mine: I choose to give to this last one as I give to you.

You were sent into the same vineyard as the ones who came at dawn, and there is not a smaller plot for the late. That is not my kindness. Matthew 20 is where it stands, and the Spirit who inspired the story is the one who can make a man at a children's table feel the ground of a whole vineyard under his feet.

Now be careful with me here, because I will not tell you a thing the text does not say. The owner did not give the five o'clock men twelve hours' work in one. He did not make their one hour unusually fruitful to make up for the day. He gave them the hour they had, and he counted them as workers in his vineyard, whole and not fractional, and he paid them as such. That is the promise. Not that your remaining years will be squeezed to yield what the missing ones would have. That the years you have are yours in full, in His vineyard, and that He does not count you from what you missed.

You are counted whole, and not as what is left of a day. Scripture puts the last and the first in the same line and the same field, and His Spirit is the one who moves a person from doing the sum to standing in the row.

The wind and the calendar

Here is the thing under all of it. The new birth is God's doing. Nicodemus could not do it for himself at any age, and neither can a six-year-old, and neither can you. Nobody births themselves. If it were a thing you accomplished, then starting late would mean you had less time to accomplish it and every year would be a loss. But it is not that. It is done to a person, from above, by the Spirit, on the day the wind blows, and the wind was not late. It came when it came. The years before it were not a line you failed to join early enough. They were years, and they were yours, and the wind blew on the day it blew.

You have a today that He gave, and the beginning is His act and not your achievement, and it started when He started it and not a day too late. John 3 puts the birth in the Spirit's hands and not in the calendar's, and the same Spirit is the one who can lift the sum off your chest without asking you to pretend the years were nothing.

Now the honest part about your mouth, because a beginning is not made by counting. Jesus put the moving of a mountain into a spoken sentence, and He set the faith needed to say it very small, no bigger than a letter on a laminated strip, so the weight rests on the One being trusted and not on how long you have known Him. Your mountain is a sum, and it has been running since the year you came, and it can be spoken to. You have the standing to speak to it, because you are in Christ and He is in you, and the authority to say what is true over your own years was given to you by the One who did the birthing. The word puts the late worker in the vineyard, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what you say further than the sum ever went.