Choosing the Lining

The shears on that counter are older than the woman using them and they go through a doubled width of cloth in one long sound that everybody in the shop can hear and nobody in the shop ever comments on.

She has the outer already. Heavy wool, a good dark green, enough for a winter coat with a bit over for a collar, and it took her four visits and a great deal of standing about in the doorway holding it up to the daylight. That part is settled.

Now she is at the linings, and this is where a person shows what they are.

Because nobody sees a lining. That is the entire point of a lining. It goes on the inside, it is against the body, it takes the wear, and the only human being who will ever look at it is the one wearing the coat and the one who sewed it. So half the world buys whatever is cheapest and goes home.

She has a bolt of a warm gold out on the counter and she is running the back of her hand over it, and she is going to buy it, and it costs more, and she is going to do that because she has never in her life been able to put something poor on the inside of a thing.

The woman with the shears says that is a lovely one, and she says yes, and they get on with the measuring.

And what neither of them says, because one of them does not know and the other one has never said it out loud to anybody, is that she has had a word for herself on the inside for twenty years, and it is not a warm gold, and it went in there because of something another person did.

Sit down here with me a minute. I am not going to ask you what it was. Not now, not later, not at the end of this. I will not ask you to say one word about it to any living person, ever. Nothing in this wants the thing itself.

Naming is not a job that was ever open to everybody

I want to start with the plain shape of the injury, because it needs saying before anything is lifted.

Somebody did something. And in the doing of it, a word went into you. Not spoken necessarily, and not always in language, but it went in, and it went in on the inside where the lining goes, and it has taken all the wear ever since. Twenty years of it. That is the injury, and it is real, and it is not a small thing, and I am not going to hurry past it to get to the good part.

Now here is the first thing about it. Whoever did that had no standing to name you.

Naming is not a job that is open to everybody. In Scripture it belongs to authority: God names the light and the dark, He names Abram again, He names Jacob again, He gives Simon a name he had not thought of. It is an act of the one with the right to do it. A stranger cannot walk into a house and rename the children.

You are not named by what was done to you, and you were never in the hands of somebody with the authority to say what you are. I am not offering you comfort there. The written word puts naming in God's mouth and keeps it there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it against the inside of a person, where the old word has been rubbing.

And thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the LORD shall name.Isaiah 62:2

Which the mouth of the LORD shall name. The prophet will not let you skip who is speaking. Not the neighbors, not the ones who watched, not the city, and not the thing that happened. His own mouth.

You have a name that came out of the mouth of God, and you were given it rather than asked to earn it. That is what the written word says in as many words, and His Spirit is the one who makes a spoken name go all the way through to the lining.

Good cloth on the inside

There is a reason I started with the lining and not the coat.

You have spent twenty years putting good cloth on the outside. Kindness. Reliability. Turning up. Doing the hard part of a job without being asked. And none of that is a performance, it is who you actually are, and the people around you are not being fooled.

But the inside has had the same cheap word in it the whole time, and no amount of good outer wool ever reached it, because that is not how a garment is made.

God works from the inside. That is His whole method. He starts with the part nobody sees, which is exactly the part you have never let anybody near, and He does it without asking you to produce the thing first.

You are being re-lined from the inside by God's own hand, and you were never asked to hand over the old cloth before He started. Scripture says He looks on the heart and not on the outward appearance, and it is His Spirit who does that work in a person who has not spoken a word about it to anybody.