The Water Was Never Too Clean

Bleach, and under the bleach the sweetish smell of the floor polish they use on the ground floor, and under that the cold-metal smell of the mop bucket when the water has gone tepid.

She could find her way round that building by smell alone. Six in the morning, five days, eight years.

She believed when she was nineteen. She could take you to the spot. She was sitting on a low wall outside a leisure center and she has never told anybody about it, not once, in all the time since.

And what has happened since is the reason.

She would not tell you what it is and I am not going to guess, and it does not matter to a single word of this. What matters is her arithmetic. She has decided that the eight years since are worse than the whole of the nineteen before, that whatever was on offer that afternoon on the wall was offered to a girl who no longer exists, and that she has spent the offer and cannot get it back.

She has one rule about praying and she has kept it for years without ever examining it. She does not pray in the building. She prays in the stairwell on the way down at the end of the shift, the concrete one with the handrail, because it is the only part of that block with no windows in it.

And one morning at ten past six the fire alarm test goes.

Everybody out. Cleaners, the two men from the loading bay, the security lad, the woman who does the coffee machines. Out into the main corridor with every strip light on and the automatic doors held open, standing about in the flat white light with nothing to do until it stops.

She is standing in the middle of it holding a mop.

And it lands on her, all at once, with no warning and no reason for that morning rather than any other: eight years. Eight years of going down four flights to a room with no windows in it, so that she could talk to God somewhere He would not have to look at her properly.

She stood in that corridor and could not get her breath.

That is you, in the stairwell.

There may be no bleach in yours and no mop. But you believed something once, in a real place, and then a stretch of years happened, and somewhere in those years you did the arithmetic and ruled yourself out. Not in a dramatic moment. Quietly, the way a person stops going to a shop. And now you handle God at a distance and in the dark, and you would call it respect, and it is not.

Find me the edge of the word

Here is one sentence, and I want you to fight me on it, because you will need to.

Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.Hebrews 7:25

Uttermost.

Not largely. Not in most cases. Not up to a reasonable limit, after which the rest is your own affair. To the uttermost, which is a word chosen precisely because it has no far side. It means as far as it goes, and then still. Go and find the edge of it. You cannot, and neither can I, and that is not a figure of speech, it is the whole reason the word is in the sentence.

Now look at the second half, because that is where your case falls apart.

You are inside the word uttermost, and it was chosen precisely because it has no edge for you to fall off. The written word says He is able to save to the uttermost those who come, and the Holy Spirit in you is why that lands rather than merely reads.

He does not say, he is able to save completely those who have kept themselves in good order. He gives you the reason, and the reason is nothing whatever to do with you. Since he always lives to make intercession for them.

Always lives. Present, continuous, unbroken.

You are somebody He lives to make intercession for, present tense, tonight. Scripture puts the interceding in the same sentence as the saving, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that word into a chest that has been braced against it.

So do the arithmetic again, properly this time. Every single one of those eight years, at six in the morning, in the corridor, in the stairwell, on the worst night in the middle of the worst month, there was a living Person speaking for you. Not waiting for you to come back into range. Not reviewing whether to continue. Speaking. It never stopped, and it never once occurred to Him to stop, and there was no hour in that whole stretch when nobody was pleading your name.

You thought you were out of contact. You were being represented the entire time.

And this is the thing I want you to hear before anything else. The water is not cleaner than you. It never was. It has no opinion about you at all. Water was never a reward at the far end of a period of good conduct, and there is no bar to clear before God will look at you properly, and He has never once needed you to go down four flights to a room with no windows so He could bear it.

He is not squinting at what you did. He knows. He knew on the low wall outside the leisure center when you were nineteen, He knew every year since, and He has been speaking for you through all of it.

You are welcome, and the invitation was never issued on the condition that you had stayed clean. The word of God says He saves completely those who draw near through Him, and the Holy Spirit in you is God's own evidence that you are one of them.