He Ran Before I Got My Speech Out

She has the speech. She has had it for two years and eight months and she has revised it, which is the detail that tells you everything.

It goes: I know what I said. I know what everybody in this building did for me. I am not asking for anything. I am not asking to be up front and I am not asking to give my testimony again and I would not blame anybody for anything. I just wanted you to know I am all right now.

She has said it to herself in the car outside that church four times.

Four times. She has driven there, parked, and sat with the engine running, and gone through it, and then driven home.

Because here is what happened. That church got her off a street. Not metaphorically. Two women from that congregation, in a car, at two in the morning, more than once. They put her in a spare room. They fed her for eleven months. They stood there when she gave her testimony, and the place came apart, and for three years she was the thing that happened there, the story they told, and she loved it and she meant every word of it and she promised God, at the front of that room with everyone on their feet, that she would never go back.

She went back. For fourteen months.

She is out again now. Different people, different route, and it was quieter and slower and she did it mostly on her own and she is proud of that in a complicated way.

And she cannot go through that door, because her testimony was given to that room and then she made it a lie, and somewhere in her head there is a slot on a wall with her name on it and somebody else's name in it now.

You may have a speech. You may have revised it. And you may be sitting outside somewhere with an engine running, rehearsing an offer to accept a lesser status, so that nobody has to be the one to demote you.

The son who also had a speech

The most famous returning man in Scripture wrote a speech too, and Luke gives it to us word for word, which he did not have to do.

The son rehearses it in the far country: Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. Make me as one of thy hired servants. That is the whole thing, and it is a good speech, and it is honest, and it has a proposal in it, which is the part that matters. He is offering to come back at a lower grade. He has decided in advance what he now is.

And then he walks home. And Luke does something with the timing that you should not read past.

But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet.Luke 15:20-22

You are being run at while you are still a great way off, and the running started before you rehearsed a word. Luke 15:20 puts the compassion and the running ahead of the confession in the order of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who set you off down this road.

Count what happens before the speech

The father saw him a great way off. Which means he was looking. Which means he had been looking for a while.

Then he ran. An older man in that world did not run; running required gathering up your robe and showing your legs, and it was humiliating, and he did it in front of a village that had opinions about this boy.

Then he fell on his neck and kissed him. All of that happens before the son opens his mouth.

And then the son does get his speech out, most of it. He says: I have sinned, I am no more worthy to be called your son. And he does not get to the proposal. The line about the hired servants never arrives, because the father is already talking over him, to the servants, about a robe.

You are being run at while you are still a great way off, and the welcome starts before anything you have prepared. Luke 15:20 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a parable and puts it in a car with the engine running outside a church.

Look at what the father calls for, because each item is a status and not a comfort. The best robe is the household's honor. The ring is authority to act in the family's name. The shoes are what free people wear, because servants in that house were barefoot.

He does not just decline the demotion. He answers it item by item with the opposite.

You have been given back a standing you were about to volunteer to give up. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is exactly what the robe and the ring and the shoes are for in that story, and the Spirit of God is the one who set you off down this road with a speech you were not going to need.

The slot on the wall

Now, the thing about the testimony, because that is the actual wound and I am not going to dance around it.

You believe you were a story that got told, and that the story turned out to be false, and that a false story gets taken down and another one goes up.

But you were never the story. That is the mistake, and it is an easy one to make when a room comes apart while you are talking. The story was what God did, and He did do it, and He also did the second one, the quiet one, mostly on your own, that nobody in that building knows about yet.

And your seat in that room was never a display slot. It was a chair. Nobody is issued a chair in the household of God on the strength of their material.

You are a daughter in that house and you were never an exhibit in it. Scripture puts the robe on the son before a single word about what he will do next, and His Spirit has held that seat through fourteen months and two years and eight months of rehearsal.