The Cousin Who Was Never Sent For

He found out about his grandmother's ninetieth on a Tuesday, from a photograph.

It came through on his phone from a cousin who assumed, the way people do, that he already knew. Twenty six people under the shade tree on the lawn behind the old house, the good folding tables out, somebody's dog in the corner of the frame with its back turned. He was in the parking lot at work when it came in. He sat there with a sandwich going soft on the passenger seat and he pinched the picture open and he went face by face, and he knew every single one of them, and he counted them, and then he counted them again.

He lives nine hours away, on the coast, in a house he built the back half of himself. He has lived there for thirty one years.

When the old man went into the hospital, somebody made the calls. When the roof came off in the storm, somebody made the calls. When there is a funeral there is a whole system of who calls who, and it moves fast, and it has moved without him in it since he was twenty three years old.

And when anybody asks, which they do not often, he says the same four words. It's a long way.

It is a long way. That part is true. Nine hours by car with two stops, or a flight and then two hours in a rental. It is a real distance and it is a reasonable sentence and no one has ever pushed back on it. It has served him well for thirty years, the way a word will when you need one.

But he drove nine hours through the night in 2011 when a friend's shop burned, and got there at half past four in the morning and was on the roof by seven. He drove eleven hours once for a man he had worked with twice. Distance has never once stopped him from getting to anybody in his life.

He knows that. He has known it the entire time. He has simply never said it out loud in a room where another person could hear him, because the moment the word distance comes off the table there is only one other word left, and he is not sure he could carry that one around and still be pleasant at Christmas.

So he keeps the good word. He says it easily. He is not bitter and he is not sulking and he genuinely wishes them well, all twenty six of them.

He just walks down to the water most evenings, and if there is a gathering further along the sand he does not go near it, and he has never worked out why.

And you know that photograph. Maybe it was not a lawn. Maybe it was a group message that goes quiet, a plan you heard about afterward, a house you have not been inside in nine years for reasons nobody has ever put into a sentence. You have a good word too, and it is doing a lot of work. But hear this before we go any further, because it was true the whole time you were counting faces. You are wanted, and it was decided in a place where nobody makes calls in an order, and Isaiah 56:5 is where the word puts it, that He gives a name inside His own walls that is not cut off, and the Spirit has been holding that verse open in front of you in a parking lot with the engine running.

The good word we keep so we never have to use the other one

Every man in your position has a word, and it is always a true word, and that is precisely what makes it work.

Distance. Busy. Different lives now. They know I have got a lot on. It is never a lie. A lie would be too obvious and would not last thirty years. It is a true fact enlisted to do a job that is not its job, standing in front of a second fact so that a man never has to look at it in daylight.

And I am not going to take your word away from you. It is yours, you built it, and it has got you through three decades of Christmases and two funerals with your dignity intact, and there is no version of this message where I stand over you and make you say the harder sentence out loud. That is not what today is for.

What I am going to do is show you something in the word of God that was written specifically, and I mean specifically, for a man with no line back home.

Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the LORD, speak, saying, The LORD hath utterly separated me from his people: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree.Isaiah 56:3

Look at who God is talking to there. Two men. One is a foreigner, who has no bloodline into the congregation, no claim by birth, nothing back home. The other is a eunuch, who under the law of that day could not enter the assembly at all, and who has no children and no line running forward from him either. Neither man is going to be sent for. Neither man is on anybody's list. And both of them have arrived at exactly the sentence you would expect a man to arrive at, which is: I am a dry tree, I am cut off, whatever else is true, that part is settled.

And God tells them to stop saying it.

You are not the thing you have quietly concluded you are. Isaiah 56:3 is where He forbids the sentence outright, and the Spirit has been contradicting it in you every time you drove down to the water and did not go near the fire.

A place and a name inside the walls

Now read what He puts in its place, because He does not leave those two men holding nothing.

Two verses further on He says He gives them, inside His own house and within His own walls, a place and a name better than sons and daughters, an everlasting name that is not cut off. Sit on that comparison for a second. Better than sons and daughters. In a world where a man's whole standing was his line, God turns to the two men with no line at all and says: what I am giving you is worth more than the thing you are missing, and it does not run out, and nobody can end it.

I want to be careful with you here, because there are two cheap things I could say and I am not going to say either one.

I am not going to tell you the phone is going to ring. I do not know that, I have no authority to promise it, and if I said it you would be back at this article in four years with the taste of it in your mouth. And I am not telling you that God's claim is a substitute for the thing that did not happen. It is not a consolation and it is not compensation and I refuse to insult a thirty year absence by dressing something up as its replacement.

What I am telling you is that a second and prior thing is true, and it was true before the absence started. God wanted you. He wanted you into His own house, with a place in it and a name on it, and that was settled in His own counsel and not in anybody's phone tree.

You have a place and a name inside His walls, and it was given rather than negotiated. He promised it in Isaiah 56:5, an everlasting name that is not cut off, and His Spirit is what makes an old promise to two excluded men land on a man on the coast thirty one years later.

It is already yours, and no list that gets made back home can add to it or take from it. The word says at Ephesians 2:19 that you are no longer a stranger but a member of the household of God, and the Spirit is not waiting on a call from anybody before He treats you as one.