The Worst Year as an Introduction

The index card is face down on the table next to her coffee, and she knows what is written on it because she has heard it read out thirty times.

Round tables, paper cloths, a plate of fruit going warm in the middle of each one, ninety women in a fellowship room on a Saturday morning. There is a microphone stand on a low platform at the front and a woman up there tapping it twice. Her notes are on her knee. She has done this in eleven states now and she is good at it, and she still gets that thing under her ribs in the last minute before her name.

And here it comes, the way it always comes.

The woman with the card says her name, and then she says: and eight years ago, she was living in her sister's basement with two suitcases and a court date. And the room does the thing rooms do. That soft intake, that shift in the chairs, that low warm sound of ninety women leaning in, because now there is a story, and a story needs a hole for somebody to be pulled out of.

She stands up. She smiles. She hugs the woman with the card, who loves her and drove forty minutes to be here and meant every word of it as a kindness. She takes the microphone and she does what she came to do.

But here is what nobody in that room knows. It has been eight years. Somewhere around three thousand ordinary days. In them she raised a daughter through middle school, learned the books for a small company well enough that they made her office manager, and settled into a church where she does the Wednesday nursery. Not one of those things has ever been on the card. Nobody has ever introduced her as a woman who is faithful on a Wednesday.

And underneath that, quieter, is the thing she does not say out loud in the car afterward: that maybe the only part of her God found useful was the wreckage. That she is not a person with a life, she is a contrast, and the contrast needs the basement to work.

You know the card. Yours might be a paragraph in a church bulletin, or the way your brother tells your story at Thanksgiving, or one sentence a pastor uses about you that was true once and became your whole name. And you know the feeling in the last second before somebody says it again.

He sent him home

There is a man in Luke's Gospel who had the worst before anybody in the New Testament ever had, and I want to show you what Jesus did with it, because it is not what the introductions do.

He lived among the tombs on the far side of the lake. No clothes, no house, chains he broke, and people who had given up trying to hold him. Then Jesus came across the water, and the man was sitting at His feet, clothed and in his right mind, with the whole town out looking at him.

Now watch the next part, because everybody skips it.

The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him.Luke 8:38-39

Return to your home. Not come with Me and become a traveling exhibit. Go back to your own house, in your own city, among the very people who watched you in the tombs and crossed the road when they saw you coming. Back to the family who had tried the chains. Back to the neighbors who had a name for you.

You are not required to leave your history behind in order to hold a new life, and it is written that He sent that man straight back into his. Scripture never once treats a person's past address as something God has to delete before He can use them, and the Holy Spirit who moved on that hillside sent a man home rather than away, which tells you what God thinks of a life with a record in it.

The subject He assigned

Now here is the sentence I would put on every index card in America.

Declare how much God has done for you.

That is the assignment. Jesus gave that man his subject in seven words, and look at what the subject is. It is God. It is not the tombs. It is not the chains, the count of them, the sound of them breaking, or how many men it took to hold him. Every one of those details is in Luke's account, so nobody is hiding anything, and not one of them is in the commission.

And when the man goes, Luke tells us what he actually talked about: how much Jesus had done for him. He kept the subject. A man with the most spectacular before in the Gospels went home and preached the after.

You have been handed the same subject, and it is written in one line in the eighth chapter of Luke. That is the word about what a witness is for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a plain account of God's doings land in a room, rather than the drop from the basement to the platform.

Now let me be fair to the woman with the card, because she is not the villain. Contrast is how a room wakes up. Anybody who has introduced a speaker knows a hole and a rescue will get ninety women to look up from their coffee, and she reached for it out of love. She would be horrified to learn what it costs.

But love reaching for the wrong tool is still the wrong tool. You are allowed to ask for a different card, and it is written that the whole account belongs to the one God did it for. The Spirit of truth is not served by a summary that flattens a person into a device, and asking for the ordinary days to be mentioned is not vanity, it is accuracy.

What God does with a history

Here is the doctrine underneath all of this, and it goes far past a Saturday morning.

The new birth is a birth, not a deletion. Nothing in Scripture describes God erasing the years a person lived before it. He forgives sin, which is a real and permanent removal, and He does not remove the life. The family stays. The town stays. The kitchen table stays. The things done to a person stay, and they stay under new management.

Joseph stood in front of the brothers who had sold him and did not pretend it had not happened, and he did not describe himself as their victim either.

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.Genesis 50:20

He held both halves. What they did was evil and he says so. What God did with it was good and he says that too. Nobody in that room got erased and nothing got wasted.

You have a history that God is not embarrassed by and not finished with, and the word says He meant it for good without ever calling the evil something else. Scripture keeps both facts standing in one sentence, and it is the Spirit who applies that to a woman with a basement in her file, so that the record is neither denied nor hung around her neck.

And here is what that means on a Saturday morning. The three thousand ordinary days are not filler between the interesting parts. You are living the part God was after, and it is written that His mercies are new every morning, which is a sentence about ordinary days and not about dramatic ones. The Spirit who bears fruit does most of His work in the middle of a Wednesday, in a nursery, on a phone call on the drive home.