The Words At The End Of Both

Paulo has two jobs on the island this fortnight and they are four miles apart, and he has been up the same ladder in both of them.

The first building is concrete and new enough that the paint still smells like paint. Two hundred and forty seats, a sound desk with more channels than it needs, a drum riser, and a lighting rig that somebody clearly bought secondhand and rewired themselves, which is the reason Paulo is there. He works at the back, up the ladder, with a headlamp on and a roll of tape hanging off his wrist, while a band runs the same eight bars over and over in front of him.

The second building is the small one out past the fuel depot, stone, older than anybody's grandmother, forty two chairs and a pipe organ with a pedal that sticks. He is there on the Wednesday about a distribution board that has been quietly frightening people since March. He works at the back there too, up the same ladder, because he only owns the one.

He is not a member of either. He has not been a member of anything for a long time and he does not particularly want to explain that to anybody, least of all to somebody standing at a door being warm at him.

If you had asked Paulo on the Monday, he would have told you the two buildings had nothing in common. Different everything. Different volume, different furniture, different books, different arguments, and he had a fair idea what each one would say about the other if you got them alone.

On the Tuesday, at the end of the loud one, the man with the microphone stopped, and it went quiet, and he said, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all."

Paulo was on the ladder with his hands full and it went straight past him.

On the Wednesday, at the small one out past the fuel depot, the organ finished and the sticking pedal let go with a wheeze, and an old woman in the second row started putting her coat on early the way old women do, and the man at the front said, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all."

The same words. In the same order. Four miles and about nine hundred years of argument apart.

Paulo stopped with a screwdriver in his hand.

He stood on the ladder in the back of the small stone building and he could hear the last of the organ still sitting in the roof, and he thought about the drum riser and the secondhand lighting rig, and it went through him like cold water that both of those rooms had ended the same way, with the same sentence, said by two men who would probably not agree on very much at all.

And he was not in either room.

And the sentence had been said out over the back of both of them, where he was standing, both times, with his hands full.

The last four seconds

Start with the ache, because it is the real one and it does not get named often enough.

It is not doubt. The doubts came and went years ago and there is a way of handling them by now. It is that a person looks up one day and cannot find anybody else holding the same thing, and the absence has a particular flavor to it: not persecution, not opposition, just an emptiness where other people were supposed to be.

You wrote off one group because of something that happened. You wrote off another because of an argument you could not stay inside. A third you never got near. And what that leaves is a man on a ladder at the back of two rooms, in neither of them, assuming the shared ground has been quietly repossessed.

It has not been. And the evidence is in the last four seconds of both meetings.

"For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men."Titus 2:11, KJV

Read where that grace appeared. Not to a party. Not to a wing. To all men, which is the widest word available in the sentence, and the reason both of those buildings say the same thing at the end is that neither of them invented it and neither of them owns it.

So hear this while you stand at the back with your hands full. You are inside that word. Titus 2:11 is where it is written, and the Holy Spirit who put "all men" in that verse did not attach a footnote excluding the man on the ladder, which is why the blessing went out over the back of the room where you were standing both times.

Now the guardrail on this, and it matters, because there is a cheap version of this message that would insult everyone involved.

Nothing here says the differences do not matter. They are real. Some of them are serious, people have spent whole lives on them in good faith, and a man who breezes in and announces that none of it counts has just handed down a verdict of his own while pretending to be a peacemaker. That is not what happened on that ladder.

What happened is smaller and much harder to argue with. Two rooms that agree on very little agreed on the last sentence. That is not the end of the disagreements. It is proof that underneath them there is something neither room built.

And you hold it too. You have not been repossessed. What is written is that there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, and it is His Spirit who keeps that one thing one while the arguments go on above it.

So the loneliness has been reading the situation wrong. Not lying about the pain, reading the situation wrong. There is a difference and the difference is your relief.

Somewhere on your island there is a room you have written off, and in it there is a person who says the same sentence you would say if somebody woke you at three in the morning and asked you what you have. You do not have to attend anything to know that is true. It is already settled by the grace that appeared to all men, and the same Spirit has been at work in that room the whole time you were writing it off.

Which is why the thing to do with this is not to think about it. It is to name one of them.