Scraping Back to the First Color

The house came to Marlene in April and she has been in it since June, mostly with a scraper in her hand.

It is a small row house, two rooms up and two down, that belonged to an aunt she liked and did not know well, and it has not been touched since about 1998 except in the way a house gets touched when somebody paints over things.

The front room has taken three weeks. She has a kettle on a stepladder and a work light on an extension lead and a system, and the system is: heat gun, scraper, wire brush, swear, repeat.

There are four layers on that wall.

Magnolia on top, which is what everybody did in the nineties. Under it a cream, gone slightly yellow. Under that a pale green that must have been quite something when it was new. And under all three, a gray undercoat that somebody put on to make it easier to go over whatever was there before.

She is in the alcove on Thursday afternoon, the one where the bookcase stood for forty years and where nobody has scraped since nobody has needed to, when the heat gun takes off a patch about the size of a plate and she stops.

Under everything, right at the bottom, is a color so deep and so saturated that she actually sits back on her heels.

A blue that is nearly green. The kind of thing that was mixed on purpose by somebody who wanted a room to feel a particular way, and put on by somebody who was not remotely nervous, and then covered over, and covered again, and again, and again.

Marlene sits on the dust sheet with the work light in her hand and looks at a patch of a color nobody in that house has seen since before she was born.

And she thinks about the word.

She got it early and she got it plain. In her house, holy meant small. It meant not drawing attention. It meant plain clothes and a plain manner and a low voice and a general policy of not being much, and it was taught with real sincerity by people who had had it taught to them, and it produced in Marlene a permanent low-level suspicion of anything with color in it, including herself.

Four layers of safe over the top of something somebody once chose on purpose.

You have that alcove. Yours might be an accent you flattened or a laugh you learned to shorten. But you know the four layers, and you have never once asked what was under them.

Peter puts the word in the most extravagant sentence he writes

Here is where our word actually lives in the New Testament, and I want you to notice the company it keeps.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.1 Peter 2:9

Four titles in a row, and every single one of them is enormous.

Chosen. Royal. Holy. Peculiar, which in that English means treasured, His own personal possession, singled out. There is not a modest word in the list. Peter is not being careful here; he is stacking the biggest words he has, and he puts our word in the middle of the stack, third of four, as one of them.

You are all four of those things, and holy is sitting in the middle of the most extravagant sentence Peter ever wrote. That is the written word and not my flattery over a dust sheet, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from a letter to scattered people and lays it in a front room with a heat gun cooling on the floor.

Nobody ever read you that list. You got one word out of it, on its own, with the other three taken off, and a word with its own sentence removed will mean whatever the room says it means.

Shew forth is an announcing word

Then the purpose clause, which decides what the four titles are for. That ye should shew forth the praises of him.

Shew forth is not a quiet verb. The word behind it means to publish, to advertise, to broadcast abroad, to tell out what somebody has done. It is the word you would use about a herald, and heralds are not known for their discretion.

So the purpose of being a holy people, in the sentence where the word actually appears, is publication. Announcement. The opposite of not drawing attention.

This is yours, and the whole point of it is to be shown, and it is already settled. First Peter 2 says shew forth in exactly that verb, and the same Spirit who moved Peter to stack those four titles is the one making it a present fact in a woman sitting on a dust sheet with a work light.

And then the last clause, which is the direction of the whole thing. Who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Out of. Into. And the word on the light is marvelous, which is a word about wonder and not about safety. Nobody in that verse is being called out of color and into beige.

Now I will guard this, because I know exactly what a person can do with a paragraph like that and I am not handing anybody a license to be a nuisance. Shew forth the praises of him. Of Him. The announcement in that verse has a subject and the subject is God and not the announcer, and a person who has confused the two has taken a chapter about the glory of Christ and made it about a personality. That is a real failure and I have watched it hurt people.

But that is a different failure from the one you are actually carrying. You were not taught to point at God quietly. You were taught to be less, in general, as a spiritual quality, and that is not in this verse or in any other, and it has cost you fifty-two years of scraping magnolia over a color somebody chose on purpose.

And the people who taught it to you were sincere, and some of them were beautiful, and they were handing on a coat of paint they had been given by somebody else. Nobody in that house is on trial. There is only an alcove, and a work light, and something underneath that nobody has looked at since before you were born.