Where It Piled Up

If it had stayed one thing she thinks she could have brought it.

That is the sentence she has never said to anybody and it is the exact shape of the whole trouble. One thing, done once, at twenty-four, in a difficult year. If it had stopped there she believes she would have been able to take it to God the way you take a broken cup to somebody who mends things.

But it did not stay one thing. It made a second thing, which was what she did to keep the first one quiet. And the second one required a third, which involved somebody else, and by twenty-eight there was a whole arrangement of things, each one grown out of the last, none of them planned, all of them hers. And every year it has quietly added to itself, the way a hedge does when nobody cuts it, and now she is forty-one and there is a shape in her past with a volume to it, and she has no idea how you would even begin to hand somebody a thing that size.

Maeve stands under the chapel doorway most Sundays for the length of the first hymn. She likes the sound coming out and she likes the rain and she likes not being seen, and she does go in, usually, by the second one.

And what she believes, without ever having decided it, is that the offer was measured. That there is a real and generous provision made for people, and that it was sized against something, and that whatever it was sized against, hers went past it years ago while she was not paying attention.

I want to read you one sentence written by a man who had thought about exactly this, and the sentence has a shape you can feel. And I am not going to ask you what is in the pile. Not once.

The verse is built as a race and grace wins it

Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.Romans 5:20

Feel the shape of the sentence, because the shape is the message.

Paul sets up an increase: sin abounded. He does not soften it, and he does not say it was smaller than it looked. He grants the whole pile.

Then he does something with the language that translators have been struggling with ever since. The word he uses for what grace does is a strengthened form of the word he just used for sin. Sin abounded; grace super-abounded. It is not the same measure applied to a bigger problem. It is a different order of increase entirely, deliberately built to outrun whatever it is set beside.

And look at where he puts it: where sin abounded. Not in general, not on average. In the exact location of the pile. Grace is not described as a fixed quantity issued at the door and then found to be insufficient further in. It is described as going to the place where the increase happened and exceeding it there.

You are standing exactly where grace was sent, and it is already there, and it was written to outrun whatever it was set beside. I am not making a large claim to a woman in a doorway. It is written in Romans 5:20, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence built as a race into a place where somebody has been counting.

Nothing about the size was a surprise

Now here is the thing about the pile that I think Maeve has never let herself consider.

She has been carrying it as though its growth was something God has been finding out about year by year. As though the provision was calculated at twenty-four against one thing, and everything since has been unbudgeted.

But the cross was not costed against her twenty-four year old self. It happened before she was born, with everything known, including the second thing and the third thing and the hedge and the shape and the volume, and none of it arrived as new information at any point.

You were fully known when the provision was made, and it is already accounted for, and nothing in the pile arrived late. Scripture says that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8), which is Paul three lines earlier in the same argument, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the timing of that sentence land on somebody who thinks she outgrew a budget.

What a pile does to a person, and what it is not

Let me say one more thing gently, because it is true of everybody with a pile.

The size of the thing has done something to her that the original thing did not do. It has made her feel like a category rather than a person. A one-off is something you did; a pile feels like something you are, and that is why she can imagine bringing a broken cup and cannot imagine bringing this.

But the verse does not address categories. It addresses a location. Where sin abounded. It is interested in the place, and the place is where she is standing, and it goes there.

You are a person standing in a place, and grace has already gone to that place, and it did not stop at the edge of it. It is written that where sin abounded grace did much more abound, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a woman out of a category and puts her back in a doorway where she can be met.