At The Fair, About His Boy

The livestock barn empties out around nine, after the last showmanship class, and for about twenty minutes it is the best place at the whole fair. Sawdust, the wall fans still turning, the sound system finally off, somebody's kids sitting on upturned buckets eating something on a stick.

Peg Alderman was folding chairs along the rail when Curtis Ivey came down the aisle toward her.

She knew exactly who he was. Everybody in that county knows who everybody is. He belongs to the other one, the brick building out on the highway, and there has been a quarter century of a certain kind of distance between those two congregations, part of it about things that are genuinely worth caring about and part of it about a parking easement that nobody under fifty can explain any more. Peg could have told you, in order and in detail, which of those things she thought were real.

He stopped in front of her with his cap in his hand and he said, Peg. Would you pray for my boy.

Not as a question, exactly. He said it the way a man hands over something heavy because his arms have quit.

She asked what was going on. He told her. It was the youngest one, and it was a diagnosis, and it was the kind that does not have a good version, and the appointment was Thursday.

So she set the chair down and took both of his hands right there in the sawdust with the fans going, and she prayed out loud, because that is what you do.

And somewhere in the second sentence she nearly stopped, because she could hear him.

He was praying too, under his breath, the way people do, and he was not saying similar things. He was saying the same things. He asked for the same mercy in the same order. He said the name of Jesus about four seconds after she did, both times she said it.

Twenty five years of that distance, and in all of it, neither one of them had ever once heard the other one pray.

He said thank you and squeezed her hands and went out the end door toward the midway. She stood there a while holding a folded chair against her hip.

Here is what got her on the drive home, and it was not what she would have expected.

It was not that they agree. They do not. She has not moved an inch on the things she actually thinks, and neither has he, and both of them would say so to your face and mean it.

It was that when the man's arms gave out, he came looking for her. And when she opened her mouth, what came out of it was the thing he was already saying.

What he came down that aisle for

There is a stretch of Romans where Paul has in front of him a room full of people who disagree, and the disagreements are not small to them. Some are eating things others will not touch. Some regard one day above another and some regard every day alike. These people are not being difficult; they hold what they hold for reasons.

Watch what Paul does not do. He does not settle it. He had every credential to settle it and he declines. He says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, which is the opposite of telling anybody their convictions are a phase.

Then he says the thing that has been standing over rooms like that ever since. Receive ye one another, as Christ also received us, to the glory of God.

You have been received, and it happened before any of your positions were sorted out. That is what Romans 15:7 puts in writing, and it makes Christ's own reception of you the pattern and the measure, and His Spirit has been holding that verse open over a county with two buildings in it. Nobody was received on the strength of getting the list right.

Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God.Romans 15:7

Now hear the part everyone skips, and I will not skip it. Paul does not say the questions were unimportant. He asks for full persuasion, which means he expects people to think, to study, to land somewhere and stand there. What he refuses to do is make agreement the price of reception. Those are two entirely different things, and an article that blurred them would be handing down its own verdict while claiming to have none.

So nothing here is telling you that what you believe does not matter, and nothing here is telling you that what Curtis believes does not matter to him.

What is on offer is smaller than that and considerably more useful. You are holding more in common than you had counted, and the count was wrong because you were counting positions instead of listening to anybody pray. Ephesians 4:5 says one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and the Holy Spirit is the one who wrote that sentence in a letter to people who were being urged to keep the unity of the Spirit rather than to invent it, because it was already there to be kept.

And notice what Curtis came down that aisle for. He did not come for a position and he did not come to be corrected. He came because his arms gave out and he wanted the name of Jesus said over his boy by somebody who would mean it. When it got that heavy, the thing he reached for was the thing you have.

You were never as alone in this as it has felt. What is written in 1 Kings 19:18 is God telling a prophet who was certain he was the last one that there were seven thousand he had never met, and it is the same Spirit who told him that who is telling you now. Your count was low. It was low then and it is low now, and it is low in the direction that has been costing you.