He Stood Out in the Rain on Purpose

It starts about two hundred yards from the bus stop and it is the good kind, heavy and warm and straight down, the kind that comes off the sidewalk in a smell.

Ari has an umbrella in his bag. He knows exactly where it is. He does not get it out.

He walks the four blocks at the pace he would have walked them anyway, and by the second one his collar has gone dark and the water is running off the ends of his hair, and a woman under an awning gives him the look people give somebody walking in the rain like that, and he nods at her, and she nods back.

At his own door he stops. He does not put the key in. He stands on the step with the rain coming off the gutter beside him in a rope, and he stands there for a while.

Now here is the honest part, the part he would find very difficult to say to anybody, including his brother, who he tells most things.

He thought it might do something.

Not seriously. Not the way you would sign your name to. But in the back somewhere, under everything a sensible thirty eight year old man thinks about weather, there was a small idea that a great deal of clean water falling on a person from a long way up might do something, and he walked four blocks in it on purpose, and he stood on his own step at the end of it and waited.

It did not.

He went in and got a towel and made dinner.

He settled the thing a long time ago. He is not new at this and he is not careless. He knows the passages and he means them and he would say all of that to you without hesitation.

And he walked four blocks in the rain with an umbrella in his bag.

Before anything else, let me say plainly who I am writing to, because on this site it decides everything. I am writing to the one whose thing was their own: something you did, that you took to God, that you believe He forgave, and that will not come off the inside of you. If what you carry was put on you by another person, this is not your page and nothing here is spoken to you as though you had sinned; there is a page on this site written for you, and it accuses you of nothing. If any of that first one is yours, whatever your version is, I want to put one verse in your hand. It is one long sentence, and it is the grammar of it that does the work, and once you have seen how the sentence is built you will not be able to unsee it.

Find the main verb

Here is the sentence.

Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.

That is one sentence in the original as well, and it has exactly one main verb, and I want you to find it before you read anything else into the line.

Let us draw near.

That is the instruction. That is the only thing anybody is being asked to do in the whole sentence. Come closer.

Everything after it is a participle, and a participle in that construction is not a second instruction. It is a description of the condition the person is already in when they come. Having our hearts sprinkled. Having our bodies washed. Those are not things to go and get done before anybody is allowed to draw near. They are the writer reporting what is already true of the person as they walk over.

That is the whole architecture, and most of us have been reading it backwards for years. We read it as a checklist with a reward at the end. It is a report with an invitation at the front.

You are being invited, and the only verb with your name on it is the one that says come closer. Hebrews 10:22 has one main verb and the rest is description, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written invitation and makes it audible to a person, so this does not rest on how much you can feel in a doorway in the rain.

And that is exactly why four blocks of rain could not do anything. Rain is a person going to get something done before they come. The sentence has already ruled that out, not by forbidding it, but by reporting that it is finished.

You have a condition already established that you have been walking through weather trying to establish. It is written in the participles and not in the imperative, and His Spirit is the one who carries a written report into a life, which is why it holds standing on a step with your collar soaked through.

Having been sprinkled

Now let me stay on one of those participles for a minute, because the tense of it is the whole comfort.

Having our hearts sprinkled. In the original that is a perfect passive participle, and both halves of that phrase are load bearing.

Passive means it was done to you and not by you. There is no version of this where you sprinkle your own heart, and anybody who has ever tried can tell you how that goes.

Perfect means it was completed at a point and the result of it stands. That is the tense you use for a thing that was finished and whose finishing continues to be the case. Not a process. Not a maintenance schedule. A completed act with a standing result.

So the writer looks at a room full of people who are frightened to come near, and he does not say get ready. He says: this was done to you, it was completed, and the result of it is still standing, so come closer.

You were sprinkled at a point, by somebody else, and the result of that has not lapsed. Scripture puts it in the completed passive on purpose, and the same Spirit at work in that letter is the one testifying to a standing result inside a person now.

One thing has to go here in the middle rather than at the end, and I want it in plain sight. If the standing in the doorway has stretched out, if the evenings have gotten long and the thinking has traveled past regret and out toward wishing you were not here, get a person alongside you. Call your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be in it with you. That is not a lesser road and it is not a fault in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people, and one across the table from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

Full assurance

There is one more phrase and I have loved it for twenty years.

In full assurance of faith.

The word behind full assurance is a big one, and its picture is a ship under full sail, the canvas taut, the whole thing carrying. It is not a word for a person clenching their jaw and trying to believe harder. It is a word for something filled from outside itself by a wind it did not generate.

That is a good thing to know for anybody who has ever tried to work up assurance, which is a bit like a sailor blowing at his own sail.

The wind is not yours. The filling is not yours. What is yours is that you are the vessel, and the sentence says you are already under it.

You have a full sail over you that no effort of yours is required to fill. Hebrews 10:22 says full assurance and means a thing filled from outside, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the filling, which is why the standing does not slacken on a night when nothing in you moves.

Now let me be straight, because I would rather you trusted me later than felt better now. I am not going to tell you that the next time it rains you will walk under an umbrella like a sensible man and feel nothing at all. That is not mine to promise. The fact and the feeling are separate and they do not always keep the same weather.

You are clean right now with your collar still wet, and the wet collar has no standing to give evidence. It is written and it is completed, and it is His Spirit and not the strength of your agreement who makes a completed thing real in a body.