The Chief Was Already Named

She gets as far as the door and then she stands on the steps, and she has been doing this for two years.

She comes. That is the thing. Nobody who saw her would say she was avoiding it, because she is here, every week, in the stairwell, with the doors open and the sound coming out and people going in past her and saying hello and her saying hello back and not going in.

They think she smokes. She does not smoke.

Dionne is thirty-nine and she can quote you more Scripture than most of the people inside that room. She grew up in it. She could tell you the whole gospel in ninety seconds and it would be accurate and it would be beautiful, and if you were in trouble she would tell it to you and you would believe it, because she believes it.

She believes it for everybody. That is not a figure of speech. She has done the work on this. She has gone through, in her head, every person she has ever known, including two she would cross a street to avoid, and she can put every single one of them inside the offer without straining.

Except herself. There is a thing she did, in the years she does not talk about, and about that thing she holds a conviction that is not really a thought anymore, it is more like a floor she stands on: this is the one it was not written for. Every whosoever has a footnote and she is the footnote. Every all has a bracket and she is inside the bracket.

So she comes to the steps and does not come in, because it would be a lie to sit in there singing about mercy while knowing that.

And I do not think anybody has ever said the right thing to her, because the natural thing to say is no you are not, and she has heard that, and it does nothing, because she is not asking to be reassured. She is holding a position, and the only thing that moves a woman off a position is a better one.

So I want to put a letter in front of her. Because a man once wrote down, in a document that ended up in the Bible, that he was the worst case there was. And then he explained why God let him say it.

Somebody already claimed that seat

This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.1 Timothy 1:15

Read who is talking. Paul. Writing to Timothy, near the end, with everything behind him. And he does not write of whom I was chief, past tense, tidied up. He writes of whom I am chief, present tense, as a settled fact about himself that his salvation did not require him to revise.

This is a man who had hunted people down. He says so in the next breath: a blasphemer, a persecutor, and injurious. He held coats at a stoning. Whatever Dionne did in the years she does not talk about, Paul is not obviously below her on any list anybody would draw up, and he claimed the top of it in writing.

And the top of that list was the one place he was not going to be argued out of, and God did not argue with him. God did something better, which is in the very next verse.

You are looking at a seat that was already claimed, and it is already occupied by a man who was saved from it. I am not talking a woman down off a step. It is written in 1 Timothy 1:15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moved a man to put that sentence in a letter that has been read for two thousand years.

Why God let him write it down

Here is the next verse and it is the whole reason this article exists.

Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting (1 Timothy 1:16).

For a pattern. God did not save the worst case in spite of it being the worst case. He saved the worst case so that it could be shown to everybody afterward, as a demonstration, as a template, as the thing you point at when somebody says my case is too far.

Which means Dionne's whole argument has been anticipated. Her position, the one she has been standing on for two years, is the exact position God chose to make an exhibit of. The chief was saved on purpose, publicly, and written down, so that a woman on a stairwell in the twenty-first century would have somewhere to look.

You are the one this pattern was made for, and it is already on display, and it was displayed for exactly the person who thinks they are past it. Scripture says he obtained mercy for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a two thousand year old exhibit and turns it toward a woman standing outside a door.

Nobody is going to ask you what it was

And let me say this plainly, because it is why she stays on the step.

Part of what keeps her out there is a suspicion that going in means telling somebody. That there is a moment coming where she would have to say the thing out loud to a human being, and she cannot, and so she stands where the sound is.

You will not be asked. Not here, and not by God, who was present for all of it and needs no account. The naming that matters is one word said to Him in a room by yourself, and He knows the rest, and there is no one in this building entitled to the file.

You are not required to explain anything to anybody, and it is already fully known by the only one who needed to know. It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and the Holy Spirit is the one who ministers to a person without ever requiring a public account of them.