Written Down Before I Arrived

Beto is the fifth of five and there is eleven years between him and the fourth, and the family joke is that he was a surprise, and he has laughed at that joke for forty-one years.

It is a warm joke. That is the trouble with it. There is nothing to object to. Nobody has ever said it unkindly and his mother would be devastated if she knew what he had built on it.

What he built on it is this: a settled understanding that the family was complete and functioning and then he turned up, and that everything about his position in it is therefore provisional in a way that the other four's is not.

He would deny that if you said it in those words. He denied it to his wife for years.

Then his mother went into a home in February and there were three weeks of clearing.

In the kitchen drawer, the one with the string and the batteries and the manual for an oven that has not been in that house since the nineties, there was a card.

It is a christening card. Blue, embossed, the sort you cannot get any more. It is addressed to his mother and father and it is dated, in the way people used to, and the date is fourteen months before he was born.

Inside, in his grandmother's handwriting: for the little one when he comes.

His sister found it and did not understand what she was looking at, and handed it over, and Beto sat down on a kitchen chair.

Fourteen months. Before there was anything to know about. Before, on his mother's account, they had even discussed it seriously.

His grandmother had bought a card and written in it and put it in a drawer for somebody who did not exist.

He said afterwards, and he is not a man who says things like this: "I have been carrying the surprise for forty-one years and there is a card in that drawer that is older than the idea of me."

You may have a joke like that in your family too. Or a role, or a position, or a way of being described that everybody means warmly and that you have quietly built a whole understanding of yourself on top of. And nobody has ever gone through the drawer with you.

The Writing Comes Before The Arriving

There is a verse in Psalm 139 that is grammatically strange and the strangeness is the entire content of it.

"Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them."Psalm 139:16

When as yet there was none of them.

Read that last clause and then read the rest of the sentence again, because the order is deliberately impossible in ordinary terms. The writing down happens. The fashioning happens afterwards. And the last clause states plainly that at the point of the writing there was nothing there yet.

A book was open, and entries were made, before there was anybody to make entries about.

You were written down before there was anything to write about. Psalm 139 puts the writing ahead of the existing and says so in the clearest possible terms, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and sits it on a kitchen chair in February with a christening card in somebody's hands.

And notice what kind of writing it is. All my members. That is not a general note about a soul; it is specific and detailed and physical. Somebody was working out the details in advance, the way you do about a person you are expecting.

You have been expected rather than accommodated, and the difference is written into the tense. That is what the written word says about how anybody came to be here, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an impossible clause land in a man of forty-one who has been the surprise since he could talk.

Nothing At The End Of This Is Owed

Now say it flat, because this is the landing category and how these pages finish is the guarantee this site is built on.

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 do not owe anybody for a card in a drawer and you do not owe God for a book that was written before you were in it. That is the whole point of both.

And nobody in your family is being criticized here. The joke is warm and it was always meant warmly and this article is not asking anybody to stop telling it.

You have not incurred anything by being expected. It is written that He has chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, which puts the choosing at a point where nobody could have contributed to it, and His Spirit is the one who has been in that kitchen through three weeks of clearing.

And you are as fully His as the four who came first, because the writing in Psalm 139 predates every member of every family, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from putting a position on you to maintain.