The Word for Not Ours

The town where Emmett Bayles grew up had two words, and it used them the way other places use north and south.

If your people had been on that stretch of water for generations, you were a been-here. If they had not, you were a come-here. That was all. It was not shouted and it was not spat. It was said the way you would say a man is left-handed. It went in the newspaper, in the obituaries, without anybody flinching: a come-here who made this place his own.

Emmett's mother moved there when he was two, for work at the packing house, and by the time he was five he knew which one he was. He learned it at the fire hall on a winter evening at the oyster supper, from a woman with an apron and a stack of paper plates who was one of the kindest people in that town and remained so for forty years. She was sorting the line at the door. She put her hand on his head and said, "You're a come-here, honey. You go on down that end."

That is the whole injury. There is nothing worse coming. Nobody hit him and nobody threw him out. A kind woman with plates gave a five-year-old a true piece of local information, and he took it as a description of himself, which is what a five-year-old does, and he did it three years before he could read a word of anything.

He is sixty-three now. He still lives there. He goes to the same supper in the same hall every January, and he is well liked, and he has fixed half the furnaces in that town, and when he comes through the door out of the cold he stands a moment in the doorway with the heat hitting his face and then walks, without deciding anything, down to that end of the room.

He has never once told anybody that. It would sound like a complaint about people who have been good to him, and it is not a complaint, and he cannot get anybody to understand the difference. It is not that he was treated badly. It is that at five he was handed a word, and the word had a category in it, and the category was people who are not ours, and it went in early and stayed. He has been a come-here for fifty-eight years in a place where he knows the depth of every channel by heart.

You know that word. Maybe yours was a family word for the child who came from somewhere else, or a school word, or a word that got used about your side of a family for years without anybody meaning any harm by it. You may not even be able to say it out loud without your voice doing something. And I want to say the thing you are owed at the door, before the teaching, before anything. You are one of the people of God, and that word was given to you rather than earned by you. 1 Peter 2:10 puts it in two clauses, not a people and now the people of God, and the Holy Spirit has been reading you the second clause since long before you had any language for the first.

A word can be accurate and still be no name at all

Here is the trap, and it is a fine one, and it catches careful men.

The word was true. That is what makes it so hard to take off. Emmett's people had not been on that water for generations. The woman with the plates was not lying and she was not being cruel, and if he tried to argue with the word he would lose, and he knows it, so he has never tried.

But look at what the word is actually able to describe. It describes an address. A date on a moving truck. Where a family was standing in 1961. That is the whole reach of it. And somewhere between the door of that fire hall and the boy's understanding, an accurate word about an address became a name for a person, and a name is a different kind of object entirely. A name is not a fact about you. It is what you answer to, and what you answer to shapes where you walk when you come in out of the cold.

Now hear the sentence Scripture puts up against that.

Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.1 Peter 2:10

Read it slowly, because it is built out of exactly two clauses and most people stop at the first one. Not a people. That is on the page. The apostle does not soften it or pretend it was never said. He writes the old word down. And then he keeps going, and the second clause is not a comfort offered against the first. It is a replacement of it, on authority.

You have a standing that the local word was never able to describe. Scripture holds both clauses in one breath in 1 Peter 2:10, and the Spirit refuses to stop reading at the comma the way that town did.

In the very place where the old word was used

Now go further back, because Peter is quoting, and the place he is quoting from is even more direct.

God once told a prophet to give a child a name that meant not my people, so that the word would stand in public, spoken aloud, a plain fact everyone in the country could repeat. It was not a slur. It was a verdict, and it was accurate, and God Himself put it there.

And then, in the same book, He overturned it.

And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God.Hosea 1:10

In the place. Not somewhere else. Not after a move to a town where nobody knows. In the same room where the first word was said, on the same ground, in front of the same people, God says the second one.

And notice what closes the gap between the two words. Nothing about the people. They had not improved. There is no clause anywhere in Hosea where they qualify, no probation served, no proof offered. The claim was made first and nothing about them earned it, which is the only way a claim like that could ever have reached a five-year-old at a plate table.

You were renamed in the exact place where the old word was used about you. Hosea 1:10 says it happens in the place, and the Spirit does not have to relocate you to say it over you.