I Just Work Here

The board over the workshop door has been repainted twice in his lifetime and it still says the same surname, in letters two feet high, going soft at the edges where the salt gets at it.

It is his surname. He has the same one. He has had it since the morning he was born, and everyone within four miles of this inlet knows exactly whose yard this is, and he has worked here for twenty years, and he is the one who does the engines.

Open day, first Saturday in June. Bunting nobody has taken down since last year. A hull up on blocks with the whole underside stripped, because people like to see that, and a trestle table with a tea urn on it, and the tide coming in over the flat brown mud the way it does, faster than a stranger expects.

A man in a good jacket, down from somewhere, walking the yard with the specific slowness of somebody thinking about buying a boat. He stops and asks about the engine, and gets a proper answer, because engines are the one subject on which this man has never once been shy.

Then the visitor looks at the board, and looks back at him, and says, pleasantly: "And you are?"

"Oh. I just work here."

The words are out before he has thought about them, the way they always are. He has said that sentence, or one of its cousins, several hundred times. I'm just one of the lads. I help out. I do the engines. Never the other sentence. Never the one where he says the name on the board and then his own first name, and lets them be the same name, out loud, in front of somebody.

His aunt is standing by the urn and she heard it. She does not say anything. She has never said anything, in twenty years, and that is somehow worse than if she had.

The tide keeps coming in over the mud and the bunting does what bunting does, and there is nothing dramatic about any of this, which is exactly why it has been allowed to go on so long.

And you have your own board. Yours might be a family, a church, a team, a house you have keys to, a table you have a chair at. Everyone in the room knows you belong there. And you have never once said it out loud, and you have a hundred small sentences ready that get you out of saying it, and you have never let anybody see you use one.

Four words, several hundred times

Let me say the true thing before the hopeful one, because hope laid over an unnamed weight never gets down to the person underneath it.

This is not modesty. That is what everybody assumes, including you, and it is the assumption that has kept the whole thing safe for twenty years. Modesty is a virtue and it does not need four hundred rehearsals. What has actually been going on is quieter and older than modesty. It is a refusal to take up the room the name would give, because somewhere underneath there is a sum that says the name is on loan.

The sums differ from person to person and they are all the same shape. I came into this late. I am not the one who built it. There was a stretch where I was not much of an advertisement for it. If they sat down and weighed it up properly, I would come out as the one they let stay. Whatever your version is, it is doing arithmetic on a name, and a name is not the sort of thing that can be arrived at by arithmetic.

You were named, and the naming happened long before there was anything to weigh. Scripture says behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God, and the verb there is bestowed, which is a giving word and not a wage word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land as an address rather than a doctrine.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.1 John 3:1

Read the order of it. The love comes first, the naming comes out of the love, and there is no third thing in the sentence that the reader is required to supply. The apostle then adds, almost as an aside, and such we are. Present tense. Not a hope about what we are heading toward. A statement about what is currently the case, written to people who were mostly poor and mostly nobody and had nothing to put on a board.

You have a standing in that room that does not depend on what you have contributed to it. The written word says He predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, and it locates the whole decision in His pleasure rather than in the candidate, and the Spirit of adoption is the one who was sent into our hearts precisely so the name would be believed and not merely held.

An heir does not apply

There is a moment near the end of the story of the lost son that almost nobody quotes, and it is for you rather than for his brother.

The elder son is outside, furious, doing his sums out loud. Years of service. Never transgressed a commandment. Never a goat, never a party. And the father comes out to him, and does not argue with the arithmetic at all, and says one of the most extraordinary sentences in Scripture: Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

Sit with what that means about the preceding years. Everything the elder son wanted had been his the whole time. Not promised. Not pending. Not scheduled for after a suitable period of good behavior. His, on the estate, in his name, while he was out in the field working like a man hoping to be noticed.

He was not being kept out. He had simply never once walked into the house and taken what was already in his name.

You are an heir now, and being an heir is not a rank you are working toward. Scripture says the whole family in heaven and earth is named of the Father, and a family name is the one possession that is never issued on performance, and the Holy Spirit bears witness with your spirit about this rather than leaving you to argue yourself into it alone.

And notice what it costs the household when the heir will not say it. Not much, on the face of things. A visitor gets a slightly wrong picture. But underneath, a man spends twenty years being spoken about in the third person by his own mouth, and a woman by the tea urn has twenty years of not knowing how to say the thing she has always wanted to say to him, and everybody carries on being fond of each other at a distance nobody chose.

You were given the name to use, not to look after. His word says as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God, and led is a present and ordinary word about ordinary days, and the Spirit who is doing the leading is not waiting for you to feel qualified before He does it.