He Said Live Before I Could Answer

They put on a thing for Nkechi in the hall in June and she nearly did not come to it, which nobody there would have guessed.

It was for twenty years of the Saturday club. Two hundred children have come through that hall since she started it and about forty of them were in the room and some of them are thirty now and brought their own.

She stood at the side for a while before it started. She does that.

Here is what almost nobody in that hall knew, and what she said out loud for the first time that evening to a woman called Ola who has known her for twenty-two years.

Nkechi came into this country at four. She has no memory of it. What she has is a document with a date on it and the account she was given later, which is that an aunt she never met again carried her onto something and off something and through something, and that there was a second aunt who did not make it and about whom nobody ever says anything.

Four years old. She contributed nothing. She could not have. She was carried, and somebody made decisions on her behalf that she was not consulted about and could not have understood, and she arrived somewhere and was alive.

And she has spent, by her own count, thirty years working.

Not because anybody asked her to. That is the part she is clear about. Nobody in her family ever once suggested she owed anything. The Saturday club is not a repayment scheme and she would be offended by the suggestion.

What she said to Ola, standing at the side of a hall with forty people arriving, was this: "I have always known I was carried. I have never once been able to sit down about it."

Ola said, "Sit down about it how?"

And Nkechi said: "I do not know. Just sit down."

You may have been carried too. Out of something, into something, at an age or in a state where you contributed nothing whatsoever. And what tends to grow on top of that is not gratitude, which is easy, but a low permanent industriousness that nobody asked for and that never quite settles. And nobody has ever read you the verse where a word is spoken over somebody who could not answer.

The Word Was Spoken Over Somebody Who Could Not Answer

There is a verse in Ezekiel, in the middle of an extended and difficult picture, and it contains one of the most direct things God says in the whole book.

The picture is of a child abandoned at birth. Not cleaned, not wrapped, not attended to. Left in a field. The text is unsparing about it.

And then this.

"And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live."Ezekiel 16:6

He says it twice. That is in the text and it is not an accident of translation.

Now think about who is being addressed. A newborn, in a field, unable to move, unable to ask, unable to agree, unable to understand a word of it, and in no condition to contribute anything at all to what happens next.

The word is spoken over somebody who cannot answer.

You were spoken to before you were in any position to reply. Ezekiel 16 puts the word over somebody incapable of participating and then repeats it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and stands it at the side of a hall in June with forty people arriving.

And notice what the word is. Not: get up. Not: prove it. Live, which is the one thing that does not require the person addressed to do anything except be alive, which they already are.

You have been carried into something rather than admitted to it. That is what the written word says about how anybody came to be here at all, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a word spoken over a child land in a woman who has been working for thirty years.

There Is Nothing To Repay And Nothing Here Asks You To

Now say it flat, because this is the landing category and the end of these pages is the whole guarantee of this 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, this one included.

There is no repayment scheme and there never was one, and this page is not going to become one in its last paragraph.

And the Saturday club is not a debt being serviced. Twenty years of it is twenty years of somebody doing a good thing she is good at, and nothing in this article is suggesting she stops or that her reasons were wrong.

What is on offer is the sitting down.

You have not been running an account with God. It is written that we love Him because He first loved us, which puts the whole direction beyond dispute and leaves nothing owing on the other side, and His Spirit is the one who has been in that hall for all twenty years of Saturdays.

And you are as fully His sitting down as standing at the side, because the word spoken in Ezekiel 16 required nothing of the one it was spoken over, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from handing you a thirty-first year of work.