Dried Off And Driven Home

It rained the whole way home, which she thought afterwards was almost funny.

Not proper rain. That fine gray stuff that is not heavy enough for the wipers on and too heavy for them off, so you spend eleven miles clicking them on and off and getting it wrong both ways. She remembers that better than anything else about the day, and she has thought about why.

The morning had been lovely. Genuinely. Somebody had made too many sandwiches. An older man she barely knew shook her hand for slightly too long and said something kind he had clearly thought about beforehand. Her mom came, which was not a small thing, and stood at the back with her handbag held in front of her like a shield, and cried, and said afterwards that she had not cried.

And then the water, and coming up, and the noise everybody makes, and a towel that smelled of somebody else's cupboard.

And then a village hall with a tea urn, and then a parking lot, and then eleven miles of rain.

She was in the outside lane somewhere past the retail park when she noticed what she was doing, which was checking.

Checking her chest, mostly. The way you check a tooth with your tongue. Is it different in there. Is there something new. Is there a warmth or a lightness or a weight lifted or whatever the word is supposed to be, because everyone she had ever heard talk about this had a word, and she wanted to find hers before she got home so she could say it if her husband asked.

There was nothing.

Not despair. Nothing dramatic at all. Just the ordinary inside of an ordinary Tuesday, the same slightly anxious background hum she had woken up with, a headache starting behind her left eye, and a wet fringe.

She got in. She put the towel in the machine. Her husband asked how it was and she said it was really lovely, which was true.

And she has never told anyone the other thing, which is that seven years later she still occasionally wonders whether it took.

Who signed it, and what they signed it with

There is a line in a letter to a difficult church in Corinth where a man is describing what God has actually done with a person, and every single verb in it belongs to God.

And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.2 Corinthians 1:22

Read the verbs. Establishes. Anointed. Sealed. Gave.

Not one of them is yours. There is nothing in that sentence for you to have done well or badly, felt or failed to feel. God establishes, God anoints, God seals, God gives. You are the object of every verb in the list.

And then look at the word seal, because it is doing something very specific and we have mostly lost it.

You are established by God, and every verb in that sentence belongs to Him. The written word says He establishes and anoints and seals, and the Holy Spirit is both the seal itself and the guarantee that the sealing happened.

A seal was how the ancient world said this is settled. Hot wax, a ring pressed into it, and the matter closed. Here is the thing about a seal: the wax does not have an opinion. The document does not report on how the pressing felt. The whole point of a seal is that it is external to the thing being sealed, which is exactly why it can be trusted, because if it depended on the parchment's mood it would not be a seal, it would be a suggestion.

Now the second word, and this one is nearly the whole answer to your drive home. Guarantee. A down payment. A first installment that is the same substance as the rest and is put in your hand as proof that the rest is coming.

God did not give you a feeling as the receipt. He gave you His Spirit as the receipt.

That means the evidence you went looking for in the outside lane past the retail park was never the evidence. You were checking your chest for a warmth, and the actual proof of the thing was already in there, and it does not glow on demand and it never signed up to.

You have the Spirit in your heart as the guarantee, which is what God gave instead of the feeling you were watching for. Scripture calls it the earnest, a down payment on the rest, and the Holy Spirit has been that deposit in you since the day you drove home.

So let me say the plain thing, because you have carried this quietly for a long time and I do not want to be clever about it.

Nothing about that day depended on what you felt in the car. The feeling was not the transaction. It was not withheld from you and it was not something you missed by not concentrating hard enough, and there is nothing you did wrong on that eleven miles.

And I am not going to suggest you go and do it again. Whatever happened that morning happened, and it does not need a second attempt to be real, any more than a signature needs to be signed twice because the pen felt ordinary in your hand.

Some people come up out of that water and something in them breaks open, and they weep, and it is wonderful, and I would not take a moment of it from them. Some people come up and get handed a towel that smells of somebody else's cupboard, and drive home in the rain, and are equally, identically, entirely sealed.

The seal was not on your feelings. The seal was on you.

You are sealed, and a seal is read by the sender rather than felt by the parcel. The word of God puts it on you as an act of His, and the Holy Spirit in you is the evidence that nothing that morning failed to take.