Someone Has to Hold the Coats

Top of the hill, wind coming across it sideways, eleven people out of breath and thoroughly pleased with themselves. A flask goes round. Somebody says right, photo, and the group does what every group does: shuffling, laughing, the tall one crouching, three people telling each other where to stand.

And she is already stepping backwards with her hands out. Give me your coats. It is warm now they have stopped climbing, so eleven people are peeling off layers, and somebody has to hold them, and she is extremely good at holding them. She takes the phone as well. She frames it beautifully, waits for the wind to drop, gets the light behind them. She always does.

On that phone there are four years of these. A ridge, a beach, a canal path in April, a leaving do, a christening, two birthdays and a very cold pier. Four years of other people looking happy in good light, and in not one single frame is her own face. Not one. If you scrolled through with her she would say something light about being the official photographer, and you would laugh, and neither of you would count.

You would not count, because you already know the number. You know exactly how many years it has been and precisely where you stand when a camera comes out, and it is not because you dislike your face. It is that something was done to you, a long way back, by somebody who has never once stood on a hill with you and never will, and ever since you have carried it about the way you carry everybody's coats. Without complaining. Without explaining. As though it belonged to you.

The coat is not yours and it never was

Let me say plainly who I am talking to, because this page is not for everybody and I will not blur it. I am talking to the person whose weight came from what somebody else did. Not something you chose, not something you can put right, nothing hidden out of cunning. Something that was done, to you.

Here is the cruel arithmetic of that. Guilt at least has a door in it. A person does a wrong thing, and there is a way to lay it down, and the way is well signposted and it works. What you are carrying has no door at all, because there is nothing of yours inside it to put down. So you have done the only thing left. You have made it part of you, and you have quietly gone on holding the coats, and you have been called reliable for it.

Hear this before we go any further. You are not what was done to you, and you were never once mistaken for it by God. That is not a kindness I am inventing to soften your afternoon. It is written in Scripture in the plainest words in the book, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off the page and lays it in a person, which is why it can land now, on a hill, four years late.

Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.Isaiah 43:1

He does not name people after other people's days

Read what God does in that verse, because there are two separate acts in it and we usually only notice one.

He redeems, and then He names. Not describes. Names. In Scripture a name is not a label somebody sticks on the outside of you; it is what you are actually called, by the One with the standing to call you anything at all. And He does the naming Himself, personally, out of His own mouth, before any list of what has happened to you is consulted.

Which means the thing you have been answering to was never issued by Him. It was issued by an event. Events are not authorized to name people. You have a name that was given to you by God and has been yours the entire time, including all four of those years. The word says He called you by name and that you belong to Him, and His Spirit is the one who keeps saying it underneath everything else you have been told.

If it is still going on

I want to stop the teaching for one paragraph and be practical, because for some of you this is not the past.

If what was done to you is still happening, or if tonight feels frightening, then a page is not the help you need and I am not going to sit here pretending otherwise. In the United States you can call or text 988, at any hour, and a real person answers. Anywhere else, your local emergency number or a national support line will do the same, and if you do not know it, a search for a crisis line in your own country will find it in under a minute. One human being who can actually act is worth more tonight than anything I can write. That is not me handing you off. It is me refusing to be the only voice in the room tonight.

You are held tonight by a God who has never once been absent from a hard hour, and you were held in it while it was happening. The written word calls the Lord a refuge for the oppressed in times of trouble, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person to pick up a phone.

Whose hands it belongs in

Now, the accounting. Somebody did something. That is a real fact with a real owner, and the owner is not the person reading this.

God is not vague about that and He never has been. He sees precisely what happened, He saw it at the time, and the settling of it is entirely His work and not yours to conduct, chase or arrange. You are not the prosecutor and you are not the defendant, and the reason you have felt like both for years is that you have been standing in a courtroom you were never called to. You have been released from a case that was never yours to answer. That is the promised word of a God who redeems, and His Spirit is the one who walks a person out of a room like that, usually slowly, usually while they are holding somebody's coats.

Nobody asked you to feel it first

So here is the move, and it is smaller than you think.

Say it out loud. Not because saying words has power in itself, and not because you have to feel anything first. The psalm puts it about as simply as language allows: let the redeemed of the Lord say so. He redeems, and then the redeemed one says so. The saying is not what makes it true and it never was. The saying is what puts the truth where your own ears can finally reach it, which is the one place it has not been allowed to go.

You do not have to mean it with your whole chest. You have to say it once, in your own voice, in the room where you actually are.

You are redeemed already, and you were redeemed a long time before you said one word about it. Scripture says let the redeemed of the Lord say so, which puts the redeeming first and the saying second, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence from a mouth to the ears of the person who said it.