What It Cost to Be Rescued

Gemma's aunt cleared it in one transfer on a Wednesday, and Gemma has not been able to say a full sentence about how she feels since.

The situation was bad. She is not going to soften that. It had been building for about three years and it involved two things that were not her fault and one that was, and by the January it was at the stage where letters arrive in a particular kind of envelope.

Her aunt found out the way families find out. She rang. She was extremely brisk about it, which Gemma is grateful for, and she said a version of don't be ridiculous, and it was done by Wednesday afternoon.

It is genuinely fixed. Gemma sleeps now. That is not nothing and she would not let anybody suggest otherwise.

And there is something in her chest that did not clear on the Wednesday and has not cleared since.

It is not guilt about the money. She has offered to repay it in about four different formats and been refused each time with real warmth.

It is that she is now, in that family, a person who had to be rescued. And she can feel it, or believes she can, in rooms where nothing at all is said, and she has started declining things she would have gone to, and she has noticed herself doing it and cannot make herself stop.

What got her was her cousin, her aunt's daughter, who is thirty-one and blunt and was helping her move a bookcase. Halfway through, apropos of nothing, she said: you know Mum had to be bailed out at your age. By her brother. She has never once told you that because she thinks it would embarrass you.

She has never once told you that.

Gemma stood at one end of a bookcase in her own flat and had to put it down for a second, and she could not have explained it to anybody in that family.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the transfer.

She thought: the money got fixed on a Wednesday, and the thing I have actually been carrying is that I thought I was the only one, and that has been true for nine months while somebody two rooms away could have told me otherwise in a sentence.

Let me say the word properly first

Before anything else I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear with you than clever.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a cleared account, not what somebody else was able to do for you. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something astonishing with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And let me be plain about something else before we go a step further. Nothing in this article is going to suggest that the money was a lesser gift, or that you should have wanted it less, or that a spiritual person would have preferred to keep the letters coming. That would be a cruel and false thing to say to somebody who could not sleep in January. The transfer was a real answer to a real problem and it worked, and I am glad, and so is God.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to name the thing that did not clear on the Wednesday, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

You were included before you noticed anything. Scripture holds it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets it settle.

Known, before anybody worked anything out

The hundred and thirty-ninth psalm opens with three lines that are usually read as being about God's power and are actually about something much more uncomfortable and much better, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying them to ashamed people ever since.

O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:1-3

Read the second verb. Searched, and known.

Not observed. Not assessed. Known, which is a relational word, and it is in the perfect tense, which means it is finished. It is not a process He is running on you. It is a state that already obtains.

And then read what He is said to know: when you sit down and when you rise up. Not your achievements and not your failures. The most ordinary physical facts of a day, which nobody notices about anybody, and which are exactly the register in which shame lives.

You are not ungrateful. You are somebody whose money problem was solved and whose position in a family quietly changed, and the written word does not scold anybody for feeling that. It says you were known long before January and long before the Wednesday, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a psalm and being able to walk into a room.

And here is what is true of you today, before one thing about that family changes. You are met where the money could not reach. His word says He has searched you and known you, in the perfect tense, done, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a verse a person admires.

What did not clear

Think about what got you at that bookcase. It wasn't the information. You had never once wondered about your aunt's thirties.

It was: she has never told you because she thinks it would embarrass you. It was the discovery that the category you had put yourself in, alone, has other people in it, and that one of them is the person who rescued you. You were starving to find out you were not the only one, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as self-pity, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the nine months. The debt was the problem and it was solved. The ache is not about money at all: it is about standing, and about being known in a family as a certain kind of person, and no transfer on any Wednesday could have touched that, which is not a failure of the transfer.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never in a category on your own. Jesus took a woman who had been publicly and repeatedly reduced to one fact about herself and had a long theological conversation with her at a well, and He was in that flat before the bookcase moved.