The Timing Is The Whole Argument

Bashir turned up two days early because the ferry changed and there was no way to tell anybody, and he stood at that gate at four in the afternoon knowing exactly how badly this was going to go.

Not badly for him. Badly for them.

He knows that house. He has known it since he was six. He knows that the two days before a guest arrives is when everything happens: the room, the yard, the second cooking, the specific business of a family making a place ready.

And he had just removed all of it.

He stood there with a bag and thought seriously about walking down to the town and finding somewhere for two nights and coming back at the proper hour on Thursday.

He knocked because it started raining.

What he saw when the door opened was the truth of that house on an ordinary Tuesday, which is not what anybody in it would have chosen him to see. Washing across the yard. A ladder against the far wall from a job somebody had started in the spring. Two children who had clearly not been dressed with a visitor in mind. A pan of something on the stove that was very obviously what they were having, rather than what they would have made.

Samira, who is about sixty and was holding a cloth, looked at him for one second.

And then she shouted his name into the house in a voice that took the roof off, and she pulled him in by the sleeve with the cloth still in her hand, and about nine people came from various directions, and nobody, at any point in the next four hours, mentioned that he was early.

He said afterwards that he had spent the whole walk up from the ferry preparing to apologize, and that in four hours he never once got to use it.

He also said this, which is the reason this is in a category called He Gave First: "They did not make it ready and then let me in. They let me in and it was not ready and it stayed not ready and nobody cared."

You may be waiting for Thursday. Whatever your version is, there is probably a state you are intending to be in before you go back to God properly, and you have been intending it for a while. And nobody has shown you the clause in the middle of one of the most famous sentences in the New Testament.

The Clause In The Middle Is Doing All The Work

There is a sentence in Romans that gets quoted for its ending, and the part that decides everything is the small clause in the middle.

"But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."Romans 5:8

While we were yet.

That is a timing clause. It is not a description of who was included; it is a statement of when the move was made. Paul is not saying that God loves people despite their state. He is saying that the action was taken at a particular moment, and he specifies the moment, and the moment is the one when nothing was ready.

Remove that clause and you have a warm sentiment. Leave it in and you have a fact about a sequence.

You are being told when it happened rather than being told that you are welcome anyway. Romans 5 puts a timing clause in the middle of the sentence and builds the whole argument on it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and stands it at a gate in the rain on a Tuesday afternoon.

And notice the word commendeth. That is a display word. The timing is being pointed at deliberately. It is not an awkward detail that the argument survives; it is the exhibit.

You have been given the sequence rather than an assurance, and the sequence puts His move first. That is what the written word says about how any of this began, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a timing clause land in a man who has a four hour apology he never got to use.

There Is No Thursday In This

Now be plain, because this is the landing category and this whole site is guaranteed on what happens at the end of these pages.

There is no Thursday. There is no proper hour, no fit state, no version of you that qualifies better than the one reading this.

And nothing here is being asked of you. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no schedule, no habit, no commitment, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

You are not going to finish this article holding anything. That is the point of the category and it is the point of the site.

You have not been left with a debt by any of this. It is written that when we were without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly, which is the same timing clause said twice in two verses, and His Spirit is the one who has been walking up from the ferry with you.

And you are as fully His this afternoon in the state you are actually in, because the move was made at the moment when nothing was ready, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from putting a date in your hand on the way out.