In No Wise Cast Out

It happened in 2014 and it took about forty seconds and Sorcha has organized eleven years around it.

She does not think it was malicious. She has been very careful about that, in her own head, for a long time. It was a busy evening and a small building and a man on a door who had been given a list and was doing his job, and her name was not on it because of an administrative thing that was resolved the following week.

He said, kindly, that it was probably best if she came back another time.

She went home. She has never told anybody in that building about it and several of them are her friends.

What she did instead, over the following years, was build a way of relating to God that could not put her in that position again.

It is quite sophisticated. She reads a great deal. She has views. She prays, mostly walking. She does not join things. If she goes somewhere, she goes once and does not go back, because going back is the thing that turns a visit into a claim, and a claim is a thing that can be refused.

She said all of this out loud for the first time to a woman called Peig, in a doorway, in the rain, at the end of a thing she had gone to once and was not going back to.

Peig is about seventy and does the door at that building on a Thursday.

Sorcha said, and she did not plan to say it: "I don't come back to places."

And Peig, who has done that door for nineteen years and has a very particular understanding of what a door is for, said: "That is a hard rule to keep in a small country."

Sorcha laughed. And then she told her the whole thing, standing in the rain, in about ninety seconds.

Peig listened to the end of it. Then she said: "He was doing his job with a bad list. That is not the same as you being sent away."

Sorcha has thought about that sentence a very great deal.

You may have a forty second event running your life as well. It might be a door, or a phone call, or somebody's face. And the thing about a rule built out of one event is that it does not feel like a rule from the inside; it feels like wisdom. And nobody has ever put the difference to you plainly.

The Sentence Is Built As A Double Negative On Purpose

There is a line in John that is worded strangely and the strangeness is the whole gift of it.

"All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out."John 6:37

In no wise cast out.

That is not how you would write it if you were simply being welcoming. If you were being welcoming you would say: everyone who comes is welcome. Clean, positive, done.

Instead it is built the other way round. It takes the specific fear, which is being cast out, and it negates it, and it negates it with an emphatic double: not in any way, by any route, under any circumstance.

That construction is written for a person who is not afraid of being unwelcome in general. It is written for a person who is afraid of a specific event happening to them again.

You are being answered in the exact grammar of your own fear. John 6 does not say welcome, it says not cast out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a strangely built sentence and stands it in a stone doorway in the rain.

And notice what is not in that sentence. There is no list. There is no name being checked. The condition is coming, and nothing else is inspected at any point, which means the thing that went wrong in 2014, which was an administrative fact about a piece of paper, has no equivalent here at all.

You have been given a promise with no list attached to it. That is what the written word says about the door, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a double negative land in somebody who has spent eleven years never going back anywhere.

Nothing Here Puts You In That Position Either

Now let this page be safe in the way it is describing.

Nothing on this site asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no sign-up sheet, no membership, no sign up, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

There is no list here and nobody is checking one. You cannot be turned away from this page and there is nothing you could fail to be on.

And if things are hard for you at the moment, in money or anything else, then nothing here is aimed at you sideways either. No amount is hinted at. No suggestion of time in place of anything. Nothing.

You are not in a position to be refused here. It is written that whosoever will may come, which is a phrase with no criteria in it at all, and His Spirit is the one who has been walking beside you through eleven years of never going back.

And you are fully welcome tonight without a name on any list, because the promise in John 6 inspects nothing except the coming, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from having a door with a man and a list on it.