The Word My Grandmother Used at the Sink

Ruth's grandmother washed dishes standing up at a deep enamel sink with a window over it that looked straight down the holler, and she talked the entire time she did it. Not to anyone in particular. To the plates, mostly, and to God, and to whichever grandchild was standing on the stool with the dish towel.

She had a way of saying things twice. Once for the plate and once for the room.

And she had one word she used more than any other, and she used it the way other people use the word married. Plain. Settled. A thing that had happened to her on a particular Tuesday when she was nineteen, in a field, alone, with nobody preaching at her and nobody watching.

I was born again out there, she would say, scrubbing. Went out one thing and come back another.

Ruth was eight. She thought it had something to do with the sky.

She is fifty-two now, and three weeks ago she was standing in a supermarket queue with a basket on her arm, and a woman she half knew from the school gate turned around and looked at her and said, with a particular kind of face, you're not one of those born again types, are you.

And Ruth heard herself say, I go to church.

That was it. That was the whole answer. Four words, every one of them true, and all of them together smaller than the one word she had just put down on the floor and stepped over.

She got to the car and sat in it and did not start the engine.

She was not ashamed. That was the confusing part. If you had asked her in that car park whether she believed the thing itself, she would have said yes without a pause and wept saying it. What she could not do was use the word for it out loud, because the word had gone out into the world for forty years and come back with luggage. It arrives now carrying arguments she has never had. It arrives carrying a tone of voice. It arrives, sometimes, carrying a whole picture of a person who is not her.

So she has been quietly swapping it. I go to church. A believer, sort of. Raised in it.

Each swap is one degree smaller than the last, and the smaller ones are safer, and none of them are the thing that happened to her grandmother in that field, or the thing that happened to Ruth herself at twenty-three in a car outside a hospital.

And you know that swap, because you have made it. Perhaps not with that word. But there is a word you own outright, a word that describes the truest thing about you, and you have started putting a paragraph of defense in front of it, or leaving it out entirely, because you are tired of carrying what other people packed into it.

The word is a door, and doors are older than the arguments about them

Here is the first thing, and I want you to have it before anything else in this message.

You are not the custodian of everything that word has been made to mean. You never were. Scripture hands you a word about your own life and never once appoints you the guardian of the public weather around it, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your explaining, who makes that word land in another person. Put the luggage down. It was never yours to carry, and you have been carrying it up a hill for years.

Now, the word itself.

When Jesus used it, He used it at night, to one man, in private, and the man was a teacher who already had all the vocabulary. The word Jesus reached for meant from above, and it also meant again, and He let both meanings stand at once, which is how you know He was not handing over a category. He was describing a birth.

Not a party. Not a position. A birth.

That is a small, physical, unarguable kind of word. Nobody debates whether they were born. It happened to them, it was done entirely by somebody else, and they were the one it happened to.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here.2 Corinthians 5:17

Read that slowly, because it is not a metaphor about self improvement.

You are a new creation. Present tense, right now, sitting where you are, in whatever clothes you have on. That is not my opinion of you and it is not a compliment I am paying you. It is what stands written, and His Spirit is the one who made it so in you, without asking your assistance and without consulting the school gate.

The old has gone. Not is going. Gone.

This is why the word was such a comfort in the mouths of ordinary people for three hundred years. It was never a badge announcing which side somebody was on. It was a word farm women used at sinks and miners used at the pit head and people who could not read used, because you do not need to read to know what has happened to you. It traveled well because it was small and true and it belonged to the person saying it.

You have that word. It is not on loan. Scripture says the new creation has come, and the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is living in you, so nothing that has happened to the word in public has happened to the thing itself in you. The thing itself is intact. It has been intact the whole time.

Now hear the other half, because this is where the ache actually sits.

Your grandmother, or whoever your grandmother was, did not say that word bravely. That is the assumption you have been making, and it is the assumption that is exhausting you. She was not being bold at that sink. She was being ordinary. She said it the way she said the beans are on, because to her it was simply the sentence that described what had occurred.

You have been treating a description as a declaration of war, and it was only ever a description. Scripture has her claiming no more than what happened to her, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did the happening.