The Preserves She Would Not Give Away

The pantry off Nell's kitchen is three steps down and one bulb, and the light in there at four in the afternoon comes sideways through a little window at ground level, so the jars go amber along one edge and stay dark along the other. Four shelves. Left side sweet, right side sour, the way her mother had it.

She has a system and she has had it since she was thirty.

The seconds go on the bottom shelf. The jam that did not set and stayed loose. The peaches that went cloudy. The jar with the crooked lid that sealed anyway but you would not want to look at it on a table. Those are the ones she gives away. Those are what go out the door when somebody has a baby, when the young family moves into the Doyle place, when the men come to do the gutters and will not take anything else.

The good ones stay on the top shelf. The blackberry from the year the rain came right. The peach halves standing up in the jar like they were arranged, because they were, because she stood there for an hour with a chopstick getting them to face the glass. Those are for an occasion. For when somebody really comes. For when it matters.

Nell is sixty-six years old and she is standing on the second step with the light on her hands, and she has just taken down a jar of that blackberry and turned it over, and the seal is gone. The lid gives under her thumb with a small sound like a question. Two thousand fourteen, in her own handwriting on the label. Twelve years on the top shelf.

She sits down on the step with the jar in her lap.

Because she knows exactly what she is looking at, and she has known for a while and has been careful not to say it. She has done the same thing with herself. Every day of her life she has brought God the bottom shelf. The tired end of the evening. The prayers about other people. The version of her that had been tidied first. And the real jar, the one with her actual self in it, she has kept back for when she was better, for when the anger about her father had finished going through her, for when she had put down the thing she picked back up in 1998, for when she was the kind of woman it would not be an embarrassment to hand over.

She has been keeping herself back for an occasion. And the seals do not hold forever.

You know that top shelf. You have a version of yourself you intend to bring Him one day when it is finished, and in the meantime you send Him the seconds and call it humility. And underneath it sits a quiet certainty you have never said out loud: that there is a preferred version of you somewhere, and He is waiting on her, and the one down here on the step is what He has to put up with in the meantime. Hear me. You are the one He called beloved, and He said it over the jar you actually are, not the one on the top shelf. Romans 9:25 has Him giving that name to people who were not that and had never been that, and the Holy Spirit has been pressing that sentence on you every time you decide you are not ready to be honest with Him yet.

The name comes before the thing is true

Paul is arguing something enormous in Romans 9, and he stops in the middle of it to borrow a line from Hosea, because Hosea had already said the thing in the only way it can be said without sounding like nonsense.

As he saith also in Osee, I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.Romans 9:25

Sit in the grammar of that for a second, because the grammar is the whole message. He calls them my people. Which were not my people. Both halves are true at the same time and in that order. The name lands on the thing before the thing has become the name.

That is not God overlooking something. It is not Him being generous about a technicality. It is the direction the whole thing runs in. He speaks first and the reality follows the speaking, the way it did over the water in Genesis 1 when there was nothing there to work with and He said light anyway.

So the question you have been asking, which is what has to be true about me before He would call me beloved, has an answer, and the answer is nothing, and I know how that sounds like a trick. You have that name on you already, spoken over the actual jar, on the actual step, on an actual Tuesday. It is written in Romans 9:25 and it was written down before you were born, and the Spirit is what makes that read as your own name instead of somebody else's theology.

What is settled, and what is still going on

Now I have to draw a line very carefully, because if I draw it wrong I will hand you something worse than what you came in with.

Two things are true and they are not the same thing.

The first is settled. The claim is made. He said beloved and He said it first and He is not revisiting it in the light of how last week went. Nothing about you brought it on and nothing about you removes it.

The second is going on right now. He does intend to change you. There is a work happening in you and He is not indifferent about the thing you picked back up in 1998, and He was never indifferent about it. Philippians 1:6 says the work that got started is being carried through to the day of Christ, and being carried through is present tense, ongoing, unfinished, and completely His to run.

Here is the line. You were loved into the change and never changed into the love, and the order of those two is the whole gospel. Romans 5:8 makes the point flatly, that Christ died for us while we were still in the mess of it, and His Spirit is the one who does the changing afterward from the inside, which is a very different thing from you doing it at the door as the cost of entry.

So change is not unwelcome here. It is coming and it is good. It just is not the price. Nothing you are still working on is holding up the claim, because the claim was never resting on it.