Drawn Before I Turned

Ezra has told the story of that evening perhaps four hundred times and it takes about nine minutes and he has it down to the word, and he has been telling it wrong.

Not dishonestly. Every fact in it is accurate and he has never once embellished it.

The evening is a real evening. It was March, it was raining, and he was twenty-six, and it happened in a room with eleven other people in it and he could tell you where he was sitting.

He has dated his entire life from it. Before, and after. He says the words before and after in ordinary conversation about entirely unrelated things and everybody who knows him knows what they refer to.

His friend Dov walks with him on a Sunday, on a lane that runs out past the reservoir, and Dov is a slow talker with a habit of asking a question about forty minutes after the conversation has moved on.

They had been talking about the evening. Ezra had told it, briefly, because a new person had been at the thing on Friday and had asked.

And about a mile later, at golden hour, with the hedges going the color they go, Dov said: "What about the eleven years?"

Ezra said what eleven years.

Dov said: "You were fifteen when your grandmother started leaving that book out. You have told me that. You were nineteen when the man on the site talked to you all summer. You were twenty-two when you went to that funeral and could not stop thinking about it for a month."

He said, "You have eleven years of things you tell as separate stories, and you date your life from March."

Ezra stopped walking.

He said afterwards, and it took him about two weeks, that what he had actually done for twenty years was take the last event in a long sequence and call it the first one.

He still tells the story. It is a good story. But he tells the eleven years now, when there is time, and he says it is a much better story and takes considerably longer.

You may date your life from something too. And whatever the evening was, it was almost certainly real. But it was probably the point at which you noticed, rather than the point at which anything began. And nobody has ever asked you what was going on in the eleven years before it.

The Drawing Is Given As The Reason For The Coming

There is a sentence in Jeremiah where God says something about timing and something about cause, and both halves are worth slowing down for.

"The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee."Jeremiah 31:3

Look at the word therefore.

It sits between the loving and the drawing, and it makes the second one the consequence of the first. The drawing did not begin the relationship. The drawing is what the loving produced, which means the loving was there first, and the word attached to it is everlasting, which does not have a start date in it at all.

And then the verb. Drawn. That is not a description of somebody arriving under their own power. It is what happens to a thing that is pulled toward something.

You were drawn rather than self-directed, and the drawing was already the effect of something older. Jeremiah 31 puts everlasting love before the drawing and makes the drawing its consequence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and walks it down a lane past a reservoir at golden hour.

Now go back to the eleven years. If the drawing is a consequence of a love with no start date, then everything in those eleven years is inside the sequence rather than before it. The book left out. The man on the site. The funeral at twenty-two.

Not preparation for the real thing. Part of it.

You have been being drawn for a great deal longer than you have been counting. That is what the written word says about how anybody ever turns at all, and it is the Spirit of God who makes one conjunction land in a man who has told a story four hundred times.

Nothing Here Rests On What You Did

Now say it plainly, because this is the landing category and the way these pages end is the whole guarantee of the site.

Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no schedule, no commitment, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

You will not finish this page with anything to do, and in particular you will not finish it with a decision to make or remake. The March evening is not being questioned and does not need repeating.

It is only that it was not the beginning, and that this is much better news than the version where it was.

You have not been carrying this on the strength of one evening. It is written that no man can come to Me except the Father draw him, which puts the whole possibility of anybody turning on the other side, and His Spirit is the one who has been on that lane every Sunday.

And you are as fully His on the days when the evening feels distant, because everlasting love has no start date and therefore has no expiry either, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from resting anything on your own account of yourself.