The One They Cleaned Up for the Photograph

The photographs run the whole length of the hallway at his aunt's house, one for every August, taken under the same shade tree with the same corner of the porch showing on the left. Forty one frames. He could walk that hallway in the dark and tell you which ones he is in.

Every August his mother drove the four hours, and about twenty minutes out she would pull into the gas station with the blue sign and take him into the restroom and do the same three things. Wet her fingers and fix his hair. Straighten his collar and turn back his cuffs so the frayed edge did not show. And then, watching him in the mirror rather than looking at him, run through the answers. School is good. Yes, he made the team. Yes, everything is fine at home.

He was seven the first time he understood that the answers were not for his benefit. He was eleven when he worked out that the August they did not go was the August his father left. He was fifteen the year she turned the car around at the county line without a word, and he rode the four hours home looking out the window and never asked why, because he already knew, and because asking would have made her say it out loud.

There are two gaps in that hallway wall where he is not in the picture. Nobody in that family has ever mentioned them. They are not unkind people. They are the sort of people who hang a photograph every August and bring a pie, and it has simply never occurred to any of them that a boy was shown to them the way a house is shown to visitors, and quietly taken off the list in the bad years.

He is forty six now. He still goes every August. He is well liked there. And twenty minutes out, at the gas station with the blue sign, which is still standing and still has the same restroom with the same cracked tile, he pulls in and checks his hair in the mirror, and he is a grown man doing his mother's three things to himself.

Here is the part he has never said to a living soul, and it is the reason he is still reading. He does the same three things before he prays. He tidies first. He does not bring the thing from March. He brings the version of himself that is holding up, because somewhere very early he learned that being loved is a thing you are presented for, and he has been presenting ever since, and it has genuinely never occurred to him that God might be a different kind of house.

And you know that mirror. Maybe there was no gas station and no shade tree, but you know the pause before you start praying, the twenty seconds of straightening up, the way you file down the sentence before you say it because the true version seems like too much to walk in with. You have been sending the edited copy for years to a God who has read the original. You were spoken over while you were still lying in the exact state you are hiding, and the word says in Ezekiel 16:6 that He said live over a child nobody had washed, and the Spirit has been reading that verse to you in a parked car with the engine already off.

The three things we do at the mirror

Every man who was shown conditionally learns to do his own presenting, and he gets very good at it, and being good at it is the problem. Nobody ever sat you down and said you are welcome here on your good years only. It was never announced. It was arranged, and arrangements teach harder than announcements do, because there is nothing to argue with.

So the wet fingers. The collar. The rehearsed answers. And then thirty years later a man is standing in his kitchen at half past five in the morning with a mug going cold, trying to work out how to open the conversation with God, and what he is actually doing is the third thing. Running the answers. Deciding which version is going up the drive.

I want to put the word in front of you now and I want you to read it as the person in the car, not as somebody in a study.

And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.Ezekiel 16:6

That is a newborn in an open field. Not washed, not rubbed with salt, not wrapped in anything, not wanted by whoever put it there. There is no version of that picture in which the child has been tidied. There is no collar to straighten. And God passes by and does not go and fetch a cloth first. He speaks. He says the word live over a child in the worst state a human being can be found in, and He says it twice, because once was evidently not enough for how much He meant it.

You have been spoken over in the state you were actually found in, and not in the state you present. Ezekiel 16:6 is where the word puts it on record, and the Spirit is what keeps that sentence from staying a story about somebody else.

Read the order once more, because the order is the whole of it. He spoke first. Nothing had been cleaned. Nothing had been improved. The child had done nothing but lie there, which is all a newborn can do, and that is exactly the point of choosing a newborn for the picture.

The washing is real, and it comes second

Now I have to be careful with you, because there is a way of hearing what I just said that would do you harm, and I am not going to leave you holding it.

I am not telling you that nothing about your life needs to change. Read three verses further on in that chapter and God washes the child with water. The washing happens. It is thorough and it is good and it is not a formality. Things get dealt with. The March thing gets dealt with.

What I am telling you is that the washing comes after the word and never before it, and that a man who reverses those two spends his whole life in the restroom at the gas station and never goes up the drive at all. Change is not the price of being claimed. Change is what being claimed starts.

You are His, and that is settled, while everything else about you is still moving. His word fixed the first half at Romans 5:8, that Christ died for you while you were nothing like sorted out, and His Spirit is what does the second half at a pace you are not in charge of.

And notice what that does to the shame. Shame says, get clean and then come. The word says, He came, and the cleaning is His work and it has already started in you. Those two sentences cannot both be true, and only one of them is written down.

You have not been put on any list of people to reconsider later. He promised in Philippians 1:6 that the work begun in you is carried through by the One who began it, and the Spirit is not standing at the county line waiting to see whether you improve enough to be worth the drive.