I Fit In Perfectly

It was a form that did it, which is a small and undignified way for a thing like this to arrive.

Iona was filling in something for a course, and there was a box, and the box said briefly describe your faith, and it was about four lines long.

She sat there for eleven minutes.

Not because she has doubts. She would like to be clear about that with herself, and she has gone over it since and it holds. She is not on her way out of anything. She was at the thing on Thursday and she will be at the thing next Thursday and she genuinely wants to be.

She has been there nine years and she fits in completely.

She knows all of them. She is on two rotas. There is a group of four who message each other constantly and she is one of the four. When somebody new comes she is one of the people they are sent to, because she is warm and she remembers names and she has the knack of making a person feel expected.

And she sat in front of four blank lines for eleven minutes and eventually wrote something perfectly true that could have been written by anybody in that building.

She has thought about it in the shower and on the drive and at about one in the morning ever since, and she has finally got the question into a shape she can say.

If I moved tomorrow, to a town where I knew nobody, what would still be there?

The people would not. The Thursdays would not. The four in the group, obviously not. The rotas, the in jokes, the way she can walk into that hall and be at ease inside four seconds.

She is not certain what is left when you take those away, and she is not certain because she has never once had to find out.

She is thirty-nine. She has been warm and included and useful for nine years and has never spent a single week without any of it.

And you may know that form. You may fit in perfectly somewhere, and you may love it, and you may not know what would still be standing if you were somewhere else.

The letter was written so somebody would know, which means not everybody does

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have been carrying it since that form and it was never yours.

You are not a fraud for belonging well. You never were. Scripture states plainly why one of its letters was written at all, and the reason is knowing, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the strength of your community, who gives that to a person. Set it down here on the table. It is heavy and it has been up with you at one in the morning.

Now hear the sentence, and hear that it is the writer telling you his purpose, which His Spirit had him write down.

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.1 John 5:13

So that you may know.

He is naming the reason for the whole letter. Not so that you may belong. Not so that you may serve well, or be warm, or be the person the new ones get sent to.

So that you may know.

Which tells you two things at once, and the second one is the kindness in it. First, that knowing is available, plainly, to ordinary people. And second, that people who genuinely believe can be short of it, or the letter would never have needed writing.

You are not a strange case. You are the person that letter is addressed to. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does the assuring, and He has never once done it through a rota.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says your church is a substitute or that fitting in is a warning sign. It is not. Nine years of being warm and included is a gift, and belonging is not a lesser thing, and Scripture is full of people held up by the room they were in. Stay on the rotas. Keep the four.

And nothing here is telling you to test it by pulling away, or to move, or to manufacture a stretch on your own to see what survives. That is a bad idea and God has not asked it of you.

The point is only that you have never made a sentence that did not have those people in it, and so the question you asked at one in the morning has never been answered because it has never been asked out loud. Scripture asks it for you, and His Spirit is the one who answers it.

Here is the tender part. What frightens you is not that there is nothing there.

It is that you would not be able to tell the difference. That a woman could feel exactly this warm and this settled either way, and that eleven minutes in front of four blank lines is the only evidence you have ever been handed.

Scripture says the letter exists so that you may know, and His Spirit is the one who does that work, and neither of them ever ran the assurance through a group of four.