The Title They Took Off The Door

It took about forty seconds with a screwdriver.

The man who did it was apologetic, which somehow made it worse, and it was not remotely his fault and she told him so twice.

There is a rectangle on that door now, very slightly lighter than the rest of the paint, in the shape of a thing that was there for nineteen years.

She still has a job. She wants that said early, because it is the first thing everybody says to her and she does not want anybody thinking she has not noticed. It is a good job. The pay is the same. In some ways it is easier.

The role was dissolved in a restructure. Nobody was punished, nothing was taken away from her personally, and eleven other people lost the same word off their door on the same morning.

Here is what happened at a christening three weeks later.

Somebody asked her what she does.

And she stood there, holding a paper plate, and genuinely did not know what to say.

It was not embarrassment. It was not even sadness, exactly. She opened her mouth to say the sentence she has said at every party for nineteen years, and the sentence was not there, and behind it there was a space she had never once looked into, and she heard herself say something vague about the same place, still, yes.

She has thought about that moment every day since.

Because what she found out at that christening, holding a paper plate, is that she did not know how much of herself was on that door until a man came with a screwdriver and took it off.

If something came off your door, come in and sit down. The pot is on, the music is loud, and nobody in this kitchen is going to ask you what you do.

Where a life is actually kept

There is a sentence in Colossians that says something so strange about a believer that most people read past it looking for something more useful.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

Hid. Not displayed. Not filed. Hidden, and hidden somewhere specific, and the somewhere is a Person inside a Person.

Think about what that rules out. If your life is hid with Christ in God, then it is not kept in a job description. It is not kept on a payroll system, or in the way a room reacts when you walk into it, or in a word in front of your name.

None of those are lies about you. They are simply not where the thing is stored.

You are living a life that is kept somewhere a restructure has no access to. Colossians 3:3 puts the hiding of a believer's life inside Christ in God, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that as a present fact rather than a future promise, which means the four months you have spent feeling for yourself behind that lighter patch of paint have been four months of looking in a place your life was never stored.

Nineteen years, and what they actually were

Now let us be fair to the door, because it is about to get treated as a mistake and it was not one.

Nineteen years of being that thing was real. People were genuinely helped. You were genuinely good at it, and the word on that door was not a vanity, it was an accurate description of what you actually did every day. The trouble is not that you had a title. The trouble is that a title is a description, and descriptions are excellent at telling people what you do and completely unable to tell you who you are.

You have been carrying a description and reading it as a name, and losing the description has not touched the name. Isaiah 43:1 says fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine, and the naming there is done by God in the completed past, and it is the same Spirit who bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, which means the name has been in place since long before anybody put anything on a door.

The space behind the sentence

Here is the part that frightened you at that christening, and it deserves to be looked at squarely rather than walked around.

There was a space behind the sentence.

That is what has kept you awake. Not the restructure. The discovery that when the automatic answer failed, there was nothing obviously behind it, and that a woman of fifty one should probably know what is behind it by now.

You were looking into a place that is meant to be hidden, and finding nothing there is not the same as there being nothing there. Colossians 3:3 says the life is hid and then says in the next verse that when Christ who is our life shall appear, you shall appear with Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the hiding and the appearing in that order, which means what you could not find at a christening is not missing, it is kept, and it is kept by somebody.