What He Was Told About Rooms Like That

His uncle told him on this beach when he was about eleven.

He remembers the light and he remembers where they were sitting and he remembers that there was work going on further down and that somebody was calling out about a net.

His uncle said, our sort do not speak in rooms like that, boy.

He wants three things understood about that sentence before anything else, because they are all true and they matter.

His uncle was not bitter. He was one of the least bitter men who ever lived and he laughed more than anybody in that family.

He was not warning him off out of pride, and he was not making a point about anybody.

And he loved that boy, and he was trying to save him something. He had watched something happen to somebody, probably more than once, and he was doing what a man does when he wants a child not to walk into it.

He has carried that sentence for forty years.

He has sat in about a hundred rooms since. He has never once opened his mouth in any of them beyond what was strictly required of him, and he has never once been able to say why in a way that sounds like anything other than temperament.

Here is what he has never said to anybody.

He has never checked.

Forty years, a hundred rooms, and not one occasion on which he found out whether the thing he was told at eleven is actually true, because the only way to find out is to open your mouth, and the rule is precisely about not doing that.

His uncle is gone. He cannot ask him what he meant. And he suspects, more and more, that the old man did not mean it as a law. He thinks he meant be careful, and that an eleven year old took it and built a wall out of it, and has been standing behind it ever since.

If somebody who loved you told you something like that, come and sit down on the mat. There is food and nobody out here needs you to speak.

Where standing is actually kept

There is a sentence in Galatians that people quote about all sorts of things, and the thing it is actually doing is locating where a person's standing is held.

For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus ... There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.Galatians 3:26, 28

Read the last clause as an address rather than a slogan. Ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

In Christ Jesus. That is where the oneness is kept. Not in a culture, not in a family, not in what anybody's people were told about which rooms are theirs.

And notice which categories he names. The ones his readers would have said were simply how the world is arranged. Not opinions. Facts about who sits where, which everybody in that century took for granted, and which he says do not determine standing in Christ.

You are standing in a place that is held in Christ rather than issued by anybody on any shore. Galatians 3:28 puts the oneness in Christ Jesus and names exactly the sorts of categories that decide who speaks in a room, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named a few verses earlier as the one received by faith, which means the standing you have has never once depended on what a boy was told at eleven.

What his uncle was actually doing

Now the sentence on the beach, and let us be careful with it, because it is going to get treated as a wrong thing and it was not one.

He was protecting a child.

A man who has seen somebody get hurt in a particular way will try to steer a boy around it, and the steering is love, and it is usually right at the time.

The trouble with protection is that it does not have an expiry date printed on it. Nobody comes back when the boy is thirty and says, that thing I told you, you can put it down now.

You were given a protection rather than a ruling, and no one has ever come back to lift it because nobody knew it had become a wall. Proverbs 4:1 says hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding, and it puts understanding alongside the instruction rather than in place of it, and it is the same Spirit who leads into all truth, which means honoring what he gave you and outgrowing the shape of it are the same act and not opposite ones.

Forty years of not checking

Here is the part that is hardest and it should be said plainly.

The rule is self sealing.

It is a rule about not opening your mouth, which means the only test of it requires breaking it. Every year that goes by without a test looks, from the inside, like more evidence that the rule is sound, when in fact it is only evidence that the rule is being kept.

You have never had evidence either way, and forty years of silence has produced no information at all. 1 Samuel 16:7 says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, and it is written of God deliberately overturning an assumption about who was even a candidate, and it is the same Spirit who came upon the least likely son in that house, which means the assumption you were handed has never been checked against the only opinion that decides anything.