Reporting In Like Staff

If you wrote down what he says at ten past six every morning and took the word God out of it, you could file it with human resources.

It opens with an acknowledgment. Then a summary of the previous day, which is honest and includes what went wrong, in the tone of a man who would rather report his own errors than have them come up later. Then the tasks for today, laid out in order. Then a request for what he needs in order to do them. Then a commitment, which is always the same commitment, worded slightly differently.

Then he says amen and gets up and makes the second coffee and gets on.

Twenty-six years. He has not missed many mornings and he would tell you, if you asked, that it is the most consistent thing in his life and he is right about that.

Trevor is fifty-eight. He has never once, in twenty-six years, spoken to God in any other register. Not in a crisis, not at a funeral, not on the night his daughter was born. The register does not vary. It is the register of a reliable man addressing an employer whose good opinion he values and has not entirely secured.

He does not experience this as sad. That is the thing to understand about him. He would say the relationship is good. It is only that recently, at a wedding, he heard a young man pray out loud in a way that made Trevor's chest do something unfamiliar and slightly painful, and he has been thinking about it since and has not been able to say why.

If your praying has the shape of a report, hear the question. Who told you that you worked here?

Paul states the change of status

Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.Galatians 4:7

Paul writes it as a status change and he is emphatic about the direction.

Thou art no more a servant. That is a past arrangement being closed. Not: you are a servant who is also loved. No more a servant.

But a son. And then the escalation: and if a son, then an heir. Which is not a warmer feeling about the same job. An heir has a stake in the estate. A servant, however trusted and however long serving, does not, and everybody in that world understood the difference exactly.

Trevor's twenty-six years of morning reports have been filed by a man who is, according to that sentence, no longer employed here.

You are no more a servant and you are already a son, and Paul wrote it as a closed arrangement rather than an improved one. I am not being sentimental at a good man's kitchen table. It is written in Galatians 4:7, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a status change and lays it on somebody at ten past six with a mug going cold.

The word the Spirit puts in his mouth

And the verse before it says how the change gets into a person, and this is the part that would explain the wedding.

And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father (Galatians 4:6).

Abba is not a formal word. It is what a child says. And notice who is doing the crying in that sentence: it is the Spirit of His Son, sent into the heart, and the word He says there is a family word.

So the register Trevor has never used is not a register he has to work up. It is being spoken already, underneath, by somebody sent for exactly that purpose, and what happened at that wedding was almost certainly a man hearing out loud a word that has been going on in his own chest for twenty-six years without ever reaching his mouth.

You have the Spirit of His Son crying Abba in you, and it is already happening, and He was sent for the specific purpose of saying that word. Scripture says God has sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that crying in a man who addresses Him as management.

Nothing here is against being reliable

And let me be careful with him, because Trevor will hear this as a criticism of the one thing in his life he is quietly proud of, and it is not.

The consistency is not the problem. Twenty-six years of showing up at ten past six is a magnificent thing and it is more than most people manage, and God has been in every one of those mornings.

The register is not a sin either. There is nothing wrong with reverence, and a man who takes God seriously enough to report honestly is not a man to correct.

What is being offered is not a replacement. It is a second register, which he has never used, and which is available, and which the Spirit has been supplying the vocabulary for the entire time.

He can keep the report. He is being handed one more word to put in it.

You are able to add a word rather than exchange a life, and the word is already being cried in you. It is written that thou art no more a servant but a son, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been saying Abba underneath twenty-six years of a status update.