Bags Still by the Door

She has lived in this apartment for two years and there is a bag by the door and there has been a bag by the door in every place she has lived since she was eleven.

It is not a packed suitcase. It is not dramatic and nobody visiting would think anything of it. It is a duffel bag with the things she would want if she had to leave in the time it takes to put a coat on: documents, a charger, the photograph, the sweater, a spare set of keys to nothing in particular anymore.

She has never once articulated what it is for. If you asked her she would say it is just a bag.

Three houses, from eleven to seventeen, and all three of them were kind, and two of them were more than kind, and one family would have kept her permanently and said so, and she left anyway because by then leaving was the thing she knew how to do properly.

Cerys is twenty-four. She became a Christian at twenty and she is in a good church and she is loved there and she would tell you all of that gladly.

And she prays with her bags by the door.

Not literally, though the bag is literally by the door. She prays as somebody who has made a plan for the withdrawal. There is a version of every prayer in which she is being reasonable about the possibility that this is temporary, and a tone she uses that is a kind of pre-agreement, and she does not know she is doing it and everybody who has ever prayed with her has felt it and not known what it was.

If you have never unpacked, here is the question. Which spirit did you receive, according to the verse?

Two spirits, and the one that was not given

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

Paul sets two things side by side and rules one of them out by name.

Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear. Read what he calls it. Not a mood, not an unfortunate tendency: a spirit of bondage, and its content is fear, and the word again is doing work, because he is writing to people who had lived in that and might expect to go back to it.

But ye have received the Spirit of adoption. And adoption in the Roman world, which is the world Paul is writing into, was not a provisional arrangement. It was a formal legal act, witnessed, and its distinguishing feature was that it could not be undone. A natural son could, in law, be disinherited. An adopted son could not be. That is a documented feature of the system Paul's readers lived under, and he chose that word.

Cerys has an entire nervous system built on the spirit Paul says she did not receive.

You have received the Spirit of adoption and not a spirit of bondage to fear, and it is already the one you were given, and Paul ruled the other one out by name. I am not being reassuring about a bag by a door. It is written in Romans 8:15, and the Holy Spirit is named in that verse as the Spirit of adoption, and He is the one carrying it into an apartment where nobody has ever unpacked.

The bag is a good habit in the wrong house

And here is the thing that has to be said carefully, because Cerys will hear any criticism of that bag as a criticism of an eleven year old who was doing her best.

The bag was right. At eleven it was right. In the second house it was so right that a social worker would have approved of it, and the ability to be ready to leave without falling apart is a skill that got her through six years that would have broken people with softer arrangements.

That eleven year old was not being faithless. She was being competent in a situation that required it.

But she is twenty-four, and the situation has changed, and a competence developed for a placement is running in an adoption, and the difference between those two words is the entire content of this article.

A placement can end. That is what the word means. An adoption, in the sense Paul is using, cannot, and she is applying the readiness for the first to the second, and it costs her every day in ways she has stopped noticing.

You are in an adoption and not a placement, and it is already the legal word Paul chose, and it names a thing that does not get undone. Scripture says ye have received the Spirit of adoption, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person from readiness into residence.

What praying without the plan sounds like

And here is what would actually change, and it is small and it is enormous.

Right now every prayer has a clause in it. Not spoken, but present: and if this is not permanent, I understand. It is her way of being reasonable in advance, and it is meant respectfully, and it is the reason people who pray with her feel something they cannot name.

Praying without that clause would feel, for a while, like arrogance. It will feel like a person assuming too much.

It is not. It is a person praying in the arrangement she is actually in, and the verse says the arrangement is adoption, and adoption does not need a clause.

You are able to pray without a clause, and the arrangement is already the permanent kind. It is written that you did not receive a spirit of bondage again to fear, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a person to speak to God without a plan for the withdrawal.