Once Not a People

She has a skill she developed young and she is very good at it and she has never told anybody she has it.

When somebody says us, she checks.

It is quick. It happens under everything else, in about a quarter of a second, and it has three parts: who is the us, is she inside it, and if she is, is she inside it in the way the speaker meant or only technically.

She learned it in the seventh house she lived in, which was the first one where she understood that being fed and being family were separate arrangements, and she has run it in every room since. She ran it in school and in two jobs and at the wedding of the only woman she has ever called a close friend, and she runs it in that church every single week, most of all when the preacher says something warm about us.

Nia is forty-four. She has been coming for six years. She is on the welcome team, which she finds funny in a way she does not share.

And she has never once in her life belonged to a people. Not a family, not a place, not a group with a name. She has been near a great many and inside none, and she has been careful about the difference since she was nine.

If you audit every us, hear the question. Which verse says you have to keep doing that?

Peter names the exact history

Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.1 Peter 2:10

Read the phrase he uses for the past, because it is not a soft one.

Not a people. That is the entire description. Not a scattered people, not a struggling people, not a people who had gone astray. Not a people at all: no name, no membership, no group with edges that anybody was inside.

That is Nia's whole life in three words and it is in the Bible, which is worth stopping on. Somebody wrote that description down and God preserved it, which means the condition is known, and named, and not treated as an embarrassment to be talked around.

But are now the people of God. And then the change, stated flatly, without a process attached. Not: are becoming. Not: are being integrated. Are now.

You were not a people and you are now the people of God, and it is already stated as a completed change with no process between the two halves. I am not being warm to a woman on a welcome team. It is written in 1 Peter 2:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a description of exactly her history and puts the second half of the sentence in front of her.

The audit is a skill and it was a good one

And here is the thing that must be said before anybody suggests she stop, because a woman like Nia will not be told to drop a survival skill by somebody who has never needed one.

The audit was correct. In the seventh house it was correct, and in the two jobs it was correct, and there have been rooms where checking whether she was really inside an us saved her from a humiliation that somebody else walked into.

It is not paranoia. It is accurate observation of a world in which people say us and mean something narrower, and she was right every time she caught it.

Nobody is going to insult her by calling that a flaw.

What can be said is this: it is a skill for rooms where the us is uncertain, and it is running in a room where the membership is stated in writing by God, and a tool applied where it is not needed does not stop working, it just stops being useful and starts being tiring.

You are inside an us that is stated rather than implied, and it is already written down, and the checking was a good tool in the wrong room. Scripture says ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people (1 Peter 2:9), and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a membership in writing so that nobody has to guess at it.

What kind of people, exactly

And it is worth reading the verse before it properly, because Peter is not vague about what she has been put into.

A chosen generation. Chosen, which is the opposite of tolerated.

A royal priesthood. A function, not a seat at the back.

An holy nation. A nation has borders and a name and you are in it or you are not, and there is no technically about it.

A peculiar people. The old word means a people for His own possession, which is the language of something belonging to somebody specifically.

Nia has spent six years on the welcome team, which is a job about the doorway, and she has been standing in the doorway of a nation she is a citizen of.

You are a citizen and not a visitor, and it is already the nation you are in. It is written that you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person from the doorway into the room they were already on the roll of.