The Code You Have Had for Four Years

For the first two years she was agency, and the arrangement was simple: you stand at the glass, you wait, somebody inside sees you and comes and lets you in.

She got good at the waiting. She knew which of them looked up and which of them did not. She knew that if she stood slightly to the left of the middle panel she was in the line of sight of the desk, and that on a wet morning it was better to stand close to the glass so people could see she was getting soaked. She never complained about any of it, because you do not complain when you are agency.

Then she was taken on properly, and on her first morning as staff a man from the second floor gave her the door code on a compliments slip and told her to get herself in whenever she liked.

That was four years ago.

She has the code in her phone, and she also has it written on the back of a receipt in the inside pocket of her bag, because she has never fully trusted the phone. In four years she has used it twice. Both times it was raining so hard that nobody was going to see her out there anyway, and both times she felt like somebody trying a door that belonged to another family.

Every other morning of those four years, she has stood at the glass and waited for a colleague to come and let her in.

Nobody has ever asked her about it. That is the strangest part. It has become one of those things a workplace absorbs. She is the one who waits, the way somebody else is the one who does the birthday cards, and none of them have ever wondered why the woman who has worked there for six years is standing outside her own building in the drizzle at ten past eight.

This morning, nobody comes.

There is a delay on the line and the whole first floor is running late, and after seven or eight minutes she gets her phone out, and her thumb is doing that thing where it hovers, and then she keys it in.

The lock goes with a small click, no drama, first time. The door swings under her hand.

And she is standing in an empty lobby with the sun coming right across the floor tiles, and her chest hurts, and she has no idea why she is close to crying about a door.

And you know that feeling, because you have done the same thing in prayer for years.

You ask for boldness before every hard conversation. Before the phone call, before the appointment, before saying the true sentence to the person who needs to hear it. You ask for it the way she stood at the glass: politely, hopefully, waiting for something to be released to you from the inside, and if it does not come you assume it was not given and you go quiet and you handle it another way.

And what you have never once considered, in all the years of asking, is that the code has been in your pocket the whole time.

Boldness in that verse is not a temperament

Let me take one word off your shoulders, because the wrong version of it has been up there for years and it weighs a great deal more than the real one.

The request that goes up before every hard conversation is almost always a request for a feeling. Courage in the stomach. The absence of the shake in the voice. Something poured in at the last minute that makes the hard thing not feel hard.

That is not what the word means where Scripture uses it about you.

In whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.Ephesians 3:12

The word Paul uses there is a public word. It belonged to the assembly, to the citizen who had the right to stand up and say everything he had come to say. It is not bravado and it is not temperament. It is the freedom to speak in a room, held by someone who has standing in that room.

Now read the verse again and notice the tense. We have. Not we shall be given, not we may request. And notice what it is joined to: access. Boldness and access, in the same breath, because they are the same thing looked at from two sides. The right to be in the room, and the right to speak once you are in it.

You are already holding what you have been going to God to ask for. Ephesians 3:12 says we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him, and the sentence hands you a present possession rather than a future issue, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes a given thing feel like yours.

And let me say the next part carefully, because you have been braced for it. The asking was never the failure. Nobody in heaven has been shaking their head at you for standing at the glass. A person asks for what they have not been told is theirs, and that is not timidity, it is honesty, and God has never once been irritated by a prayer that took Him at less than He is.

You were not being kept outside by anything but an old arrangement. Scripture says that ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but the Spirit of adoption, and Paul names bondage and adoption as two different arrangements a person can be living under rather than two different levels of Christian, and it is that same Spirit who cries Father in you when you are too tired to work out what you are.

The door was released the day the standing was given

Here is what actually happened at the cross, put in the plainest terms I know.

The veil in the temple tore. Top to bottom, which is the direction that tells you whose hands did it. That was not a decoration coming down, it was a permanent notice about access: the room that only one man could enter once a year is open, and it was opened from the inside.

Everything Hebrews says about your boldness rests on that torn curtain. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, it says, and the word "therefore" is doing all the work, because it points back at what Jesus has already done rather than forward at what you are going to manage.

Nothing is being withheld from you until you are braver. His word says let us come boldly unto the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need, and it puts the coming before the help rather than after it, so the courage was never the entry requirement, and the Spirit is the one who leads a person through a door that has been standing open the whole time.

This matters especially if you have spent years assuming that boldness is a reward. That the confident ones got it because they walked closely enough, or served long enough, or believed hard enough, and that yours is on hold pending improvement.

You were given this as an heir, on the day you came into the family, and it has never once been performance related. Scripture says that if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, and an heir does not earn the estate, an heir is simply the one it belongs to, and the Spirit of God is described in the same passage as bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.

There is no tier here. Nobody in the family has more access than you. The woman who prays out loud in a room of two hundred and the woman who has stood at the glass for four years have exactly the same code, because it was never a code you earned. It was one you were handed on a compliments slip by somebody who had the authority to hand it over.