The Tea a Stranger Brought Her

Third hour. The clock on that wall is four minutes slow and everybody in the room has worked it out independently and nobody has said anything.

Ruth-Ann is fifty-eight and she came on her own, which is how she does everything, and which is not a tragedy and is not a story about neglect.

There genuinely was nobody to call. Her sister is four hours away and would have come and would have been more trouble than help, and she loves her sister. The two people at work she might have asked are people she manages, and you do not. There is a woman at the place she goes on a Thursday who would have come in a heartbeat, and Ruth-Ann did not ask her, and could not have told you exactly why, and would have said something about not wanting to make a fuss.

She is competent. That word is doing a great deal of work in her life and always has.

She has a book she is not reading and a phone at eleven percent and a cardigan over her knees, and she has been in that chair since twenty past one.

At about ten past four a woman down the row gets up and goes to the machine in the corner.

Ruth-Ann does not know her. They have not spoken. She is here for somebody too; there was a name called earlier and she went in and came out again and sat back down.

She comes back with two cups.

She does not say anything. She does not make it a moment. She puts one down on the arm of the chair next to Ruth-Ann, the empty one, within reach, and sits back down four seats away and picks up her own magazine.

And Ruth-Ann does not know what to do with her face.

That is the honest description of what happens next in that room. A fifty-eight-year-old woman who has run departments and buried both parents and handled worse afternoons than this one entirely alone sits in a plastic chair looking at a paper cup, and finds that she has no idea what her face is supposed to be doing, because she has no muscle for this at all.

She has been given something. Nothing was asked. There is nothing to manage, nobody to thank at length, no way to make it even, and no opening to refuse it through.

You know that feeling. Your waiting room is somewhere else and yours might be a casserole or a lift or somebody just sitting down next to you. But you know the moment, and you know how badly you handled it, and you know exactly which muscle it is you have not got.

Two words out, two words in

Ephesians 2 is about people being brought in from outside, and verse nineteen does it by naming what they are not any more and then what they are.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Start with the two words he takes away.

Strangers. Foreigners. Both of those describe a person who is present but does not belong: somebody in the room without standing in it, tolerated, temporary, with no claim on anything and no place at any table.

That is a fairly exact description of how a competent woman sits in a waiting room.

And then: now therefore ye are no more.

No more. It is a completed phrase. Paul is not describing a process or a hope; he is describing a status that has already changed, and he puts the word now in front of it.

You are no more a stranger, and it is written as something already done rather than something being worked toward. That is the written word and not my sympathy in a waiting room, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence about outsiders brought in and lays it on a plastic chair at ten past four.

Now the two words he puts in.

Fellowcitizens, which is a civic word: it means rights, standing, a place in a city that nobody can question.

And then a second one that is much warmer and much more domestic, and it is the one for you this afternoon.

Household is a house word

Of the household of God.

The word behind household means of the house. Domestic. It is not the word for a member of an organization. It is the word for the people who live somewhere: the ones who know where the cups are, who come in without knocking, who are part of the traffic of a home.

And here is why that word answers what just happened to you.

In an institution, being given something creates an obligation. There is a ledger, even an invisible one, and you know roughly what you owe and you plan to return it.

In a house, being handed things is simply the traffic. Somebody makes tea for four people because they are making one for themselves. Somebody hands you a plate on the way past. Nobody records any of it, because recording it would be the strange behavior, not the receiving.

This is yours, and you are described as being of the house, and it is already settled. Ephesians 2 says household in a word that means domestic, and the same Spirit through whom Paul says two verses later that we are builded together for an habitation of God is the one making it a present fact in a woman with a cardigan over her knees.

You have spent thirty years being a fellowcitizen. Rights, standing, duty, competence, showing up. You have never once been of the house, and the difference between those two is the reason a paper cup has taken the legs out from under you.

Let me guard this, because it needs guarding.

I am not saying you were wrong to be competent. You have carried things that had to be carried and there was no one else and you did it, and God saw every hour of it and none of it was wasted.

And I am not telling you the answer is to attend more things. That is not what this article is for and it is not what household means; a person can attend for forty years and never once be handed anything.

And if you are reading this with genuinely nobody in your life, you are not outside this sentence. The status in that verse is not conferred by anybody in a room. It is stated over you by God, and it is stated in the past tense, and the first person you name today may be somebody you have not thought of in years.