The Bay With the Tape Across It

Seven in the morning at the shop and Beto has already been in for an hour, which is how everybody knows it is a Monday.

The roller doors go up. The radio comes on. Somebody's coffee flask lands on the tool chest and somebody else says something about the game and gets told to work. Ordinary. Except that bay three, which is the middle bay and the one with the good light, has yellow tape strung across it at waist height and a laminated card zip tied to the post, and the floor under it has been swept and degreased and is the cleanest square of concrete in the building.

There is no car in it. That is the thing.

Rafa comes in at ten past and stands looking at it with his jacket half off. He is twenty-six. He came to this trade late, after two years of doing something else badly, and every single day since he walked in here he has carried the same quiet conviction: that he is the one they let in. Not the one they hired. The one they let in. It is not true and nobody in the building thinks it, and it makes no difference at all to how true it feels at ten past seven on a Monday.

He asks Beto why bay three is taped. Beto does not look up from the bench. Because the car is coming Wednesday, he says. That one goes in there.

And Rafa says, but there is nothing in it. And Beto, who is sixty and has said maybe four thousand words to Rafa in two years, says the sentence that follows Rafa around for the rest of the week. It does not have to have anything in it. It is not the bay that decides. It is the car that is coming, and the man who said where it goes.

Two days of tape across an empty floor. Assigned before the thing it is for has even been delivered. The floor did not apply. The floor did not pass anything. Somebody with the schedule in his hand went round with a roll of tape at six in the morning and marked it off, and now nobody parks there.

You have stood in that doorway. Different trade, different room, same quiet arithmetic running underneath the day: that you are the one they let in, and that a word like holy is a qualification you do not hold and were never going to.

Paul says it standing in chains in front of a king

This is a courtroom scene. Paul is on trial, in irons, in front of Agrippa, and he is telling the king what Jesus said to him on the road. And in the middle of the commission there is a phrase I want you to hold.

To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.Acts 26:18

Among them which are sanctified. Not, among them which have sanctified themselves. Not, among them which qualified. The word is in the passive, which in ordinary English means it happened to them, and somebody else did it.

And look at the noun sitting in front of it. Inheritance. Nobody has ever earned an inheritance in the whole history of the world. That is not what the word means. An inheritance is decided entirely by the one who leaves it, and the person receiving it contributes precisely nothing except being named.

You have an inheritance among the sanctified, and it was assigned rather than awarded. Paul said it in a courtroom with iron on his wrists and it is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence spoken to a king and lays it across a swept floor in a shop on a Monday morning.

Here is what that does to the sentence you have been carrying. You have been reading called to be holy as a job description you cannot meet, with an interview at the end of it. Paul reads it as a company you are placed among, by faith in Him, by His decision, in the passive voice, with your name on the schedule of somebody who was walking around at six in the morning with a roll of tape.

The qualifying is His work too

Somebody will say, yes, but there must be some qualifying. There is. It is just not yours. Paul says it plainly elsewhere: God has made us fit to share the inheritance of the saints in light. He did the making fit. It is His verb again, exactly like the tape.

And notice the last four words of the Acts sentence: by faith that is in me. Even the faith is described as being in Him, resting on Him, located in Him and not manufactured in you and held up for inspection. Faith is the open hand. It is not the price.

It is already settled, and the settling was done by somebody holding the schedule and not by anybody holding a rag. The word says sanctified by faith that is in Him, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to say it in front of Agrippa is the one making it a present fact where your boots actually are.

I want to guard this, because there is a lazy version of it that would be no help to you at all. I am not telling you the work does not matter. In this trade you can tell in ten seconds whether a man cares, and the same is true in a life. What I am telling you is that the bay was marked before the car came, and no amount of sweeping made it the marked bay, and no amount of dirt would have unmarked it. The care comes after. It always came after. That is not a lower standard than the one you were carrying. It is a heavier one, and it is carried by Him.

And the people who taught you that the word was a qualification were mostly repeating what they were handed. Nobody is on trial here except the arithmetic.