Holy Was Never Hard To Be Near

You were eight, and the plastic was still on the sofa.

You remember the smell of that front room and the particular quality of the quiet in it. You remember that everybody sat up straighter. You remember that your mother's voice went up half a tone when she spoke in that house, and came back down again in the car.

And you remember what people said about the woman who lived there. They said she was the holiest person any of them had ever met, and they said it in the voice people use for something admirable that they are relieved to be leaving.

She was not cruel to you. That is the part that makes this complicated and it is worth saying straight away. She never raised her hand and never raised her voice. She gave you a boiled sweet from a tin and asked you a question about school and listened to the answer. She was not a monster and she does not deserve to be turned into one thirty years later by a person writing on the internet.

She was just very hard to be near.

There was a list, and everyone in the room could feel the list, including her, and the list was long and you did not know all of it and neither did anybody else, which meant that the safest thing to do in that room was less. Say less. Move less. Laugh at nothing. And so you all did, for two hours, once a month, and then you got in the car and the volume came back up somewhere around the third roundabout.

That is where you got the word.

And it went in the way words go into an eight year old, whole and unexamined, and it has been sitting in you ever since with the plastic sofa attached to it. Which is why, when somebody says holy from a platform now, you feel a small physical thing happen behind your sternum, and you have never once traced it, and you have quietly stopped asking for the thing the word is meant to name.

You did not lose your appetite for God. You lost your appetite for the room.

The sentence with the order the wrong way round

There is a line Paul writes to a young church, and it has an order in it that almost nobody expects, because most of us were handed the two halves in the opposite sequence.

And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you, so that He may establish your hearts blameless in holiness before our God and Father.1 Thessalonians 3, verses 12 and 13

Read the joint in the middle. So that.

Love first. Increasing love, overflowing love, love spilling past the edges of the people who deserve it and out to everyone. And then, as the result of that, hearts established blameless in holiness.

Not the other way round. Paul does not say get yourself clean so that you will be capable of love. He says God pours love through you until it overflows, and the overflow is what establishes the heart.

Which means holiness, biblically, is not a fence around a life. It is what happens to a person who has had far too much love poured through them for far too long.

Now look back at that front room with this in your hand, and be gentle, because this is the part that heals rather than the part that accuses.

What that woman had was the list. Somebody had handed her the second half of the sentence without the first half of it, probably decades before you were born, and she had kept it faithfully at enormous personal cost, and she had nothing warm coming through her because nobody had ever poured anything warm into her. She was not a hypocrite. She was under-supplied. She held a standard she had been given, alone, in a house with the plastic on the sofa, and it made her rigid, and rigid is what everybody in the family called holy because nobody there had a better word. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

That is the pattern. Name the pattern and let the woman rest.

And then take the word back, because the word does not belong to that room and never did.

So hold the two of them together before the story below. You are being drawn toward the warmest person who has ever lived and never toward the coldest room you have ever sat in. That is what the written word says about Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works His likeness into a person, and no severity you were shown has ever been the destination.