Please Was Never the Wrong Word

At twenty to ten on a Sunday night she sits on the edge of the bed with the lamp on and a spiral notebook open on her knees, and she writes the same three words she has written for eleven years.

This is the fourth notebook. The first three are in the drawer under the winter jumpers, held together with an elastic band that has gone brittle and pale. Every page of all four begins the same way. Please let me in. The handwriting changes across the years. It gets smaller, then tired, then steady again after the bad spring. The three words hold.

Somebody told her once, kindly, standing in a kitchen with a tea towel over one shoulder, that she already had the thing she was asking for. She wrote that down too. Page fifty something of the second notebook, in blue ink: she says I already have it. And then, on the very next line, the same night, the same pen: please let me in.

She is not slow and she is not faithless. She has simply never in her life been handed a thing she did not have to work for first, so she has stayed at the door and kept knocking, out of a kind of loyalty. Knocking felt like the only way to stay near it.

That is your notebook. Yours may not be paper. But there is a sentence you have been saying since you were young enough for it to wear a groove, and you say it into the dark at more or less the same hour, and someone has told you at least once that you already have what you are asking for, and it did not land. How could it. Nothing in your life has ever arrived that way.

The two verbs on the page

You are safe here. Let us go slowly, because this is the kind of thing a person can only hear when nobody is rushing them. You have access before the sentence is finished. Hebrews keeps having on the page, and the Holy Spirit makes that written welcome present without hurrying you.

Here is the sentence the whole of it turns on. Read it the way you would read a letter with your own name on the envelope, because that is what it is.

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh.Hebrews 10:19-20

Now look at the verb, because I am a teacher and the verb is where the whole comfort is hiding.

Not hoping to have. Not permitted to apply for. Having. It is written as a thing already in the hand of the person reading it, the way you would say having your coat, and every instruction after it is simply what to do next now that it is true. The writer does not argue you into access. He assumes it, and then he says the tender thing: let us draw near.

The same grammar runs everywhere the blood is named. Paul tells the church at Ephesus that in Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. He writes to people who had been a long way off and tells them they are made near by the blood of Christ. Not that they will be, once they settle down, once they get the wording right, once they have asked enough times to look serious about it. That they are. Past payment, present possession, and no gap in the middle for you to fall through.

And now the thing I want you to hear before anything else tonight, because I know the shape of the shame that is already gathering.

The asking was not the error. Please was never the wrong word. Every one of those pages was a woman refusing to walk away from a door, and heaven does not read that as ignorance. It reads as love that would not leave. I will not stand here and make you feel foolish for eleven years of faithfulness, and neither will He. Children ask their fathers for things they already have the run of the house for, and no good father has ever once been annoyed by it.

So this is not a correction. It is a handing over.

Because here is what has actually been happening at twenty to ten. You have been asking for the thing while holding the thing, the way a woman turns the house over looking for the glasses that are on her head. And the wall that has kept it from landing is not doubt about God in general. You believe He does this. You have watched Him do it for other people and been genuinely glad. The wall is the quiet, settled conviction that you are the exception. That whatever was opened, was opened for the sort of person who is not you.

Hear this plainly. What was opened was opened by the blood of Jesus, once, entirely, at His cost and not at yours. There is no second payment. There is nothing you could add to it and nothing anybody could ask you to add to it, and the door does not swing wider for the impressive and narrower for the tired. It was never priced against you. You are not a party to that transaction. You are the one it was done for. You possess the access Christ secured, even while your heart is still learning to call it yours. Hebrews supplies the written ground, and the Holy Spirit carries the welcome without requiring a feeling.

And there is no formula in this. No arrangement of words that works if you say it correctly and fails if you fumble it. Words are not spells. A declaration agrees aloud with a door God already opened, and the power was never in the arrangement of words. So the settled conviction that you are the exception is something you may answer directly. Not because a certain quantity of faith activates the result, but because Hebrews has already named the ground: the blood of Jesus, not your performance.