The Ninth Card

There are eight cards in the bin and Rowan is starting the ninth.

He is eleven. His gran is seventy on Saturday. And he has decided, because he is that sort of boy, that a shop card would be a bit of an insult, so he has got the good paper out and the pens that are supposed to stay in the drawer.

Card one: he wrote Happy and the y went wrong.

Card two: fine until the second line, where he ran out of room and the seventy had to shrink.

Card three: he pressed too hard and the pen went through.

Card four had a smudge from his hand. Card five he did in pencil first to be safe and then could not rub the pencil out from under the pen. Card six was actually all right until he looked at it for a while. Card seven he does not talk about. Card eight was going beautifully and then he thought about card seven and the b went funny.

His mum comes in at about ten past nine at night and finds him at the table with his shoulders up round his ears, ruling faint lines onto card nine with a ruler and a very sharp pencil.

She does not tell him he is being silly. That is the thing about her.

She sits down opposite and picks up card six out of the bin, and smooths it out, and reads it properly.

Then she says, "Rowan. This one is lovely."

And he says, "The b is wrong."

And she says, "I know. Come here a minute."

And she says the thing that a boy of eleven does not understand for about fifteen years, and then understands all at once, standing in a kitchen, long after his gran has died.

"She does not want your best handwriting, love. She wants your handwriting."

Now let me tell you what I think you have been doing, and you can tell me if I am wrong.

There is a version of you that you are working on. Not a fantasy version. A realistic one, actually, which is what makes it so persuasive. A you who gets up earlier, who is less snappy in the evenings, who has that thing under control, who has read the thing and stopped the other thing.

And you have quietly agreed with yourself that that is the one who gets to come close to God and believe He is pleased.

Not this one. This one is a draft. This one has a smudge on it.

Look at the moment He chose

Paul writes a sentence in Romans about timing, and the timing is the whole argument.

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

The load-bearing word is while.

Not after. Not once. Not when we had made a start. While. In the middle of it. At the exact point in the draft where the pen had gone through the paper.

And notice it says He demonstrates it, which is a word about showing rather than feeling. Paul is saying that the moment God picked is itself the message. If He had waited for the improved version, the demonstration would have been about the improvement. He did not wait, so the demonstration is about Him.

So hear this over you, tonight, in the state the day has actually left you in. You are loved at the exact point you are standing, and the timing of the cross is the proof of it, and there is no tidier draft of you that God has been holding out for. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written love and gets it past a person's defenses, which is why some of you have gone quiet just now.

Now I want to give you the reasoning underneath it, because you are the kind of person who will not rest on a feeling and should not have to.

Think about what your project actually requires God to be.

It requires Him to be somebody whose affection tracks your performance. And if that were true, then the affection would be for the performance, which means that on your best possible day, at your very tidiest, you still would not be loved. A thing you achieved would be.

That is not a warmer relationship. It is a colder one, and it is the one your effort has been quietly building.

The alternative is harder to receive and it is the one Scripture actually teaches: that He set His love on you at the worst available moment, on purpose, so that you would never be able to attribute it to anything about the draft.

You are not a rough copy being tolerated until a fair copy arrives. You are the one He wanted, in this handwriting, with the smudge on it. That is written down, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a loved person feel loved, and He does that at His own pace and never on the schedule of a person's self-improvement plan.

Let me guard the flank, because you are wise enough to look for the catch.

None of this means the improvements do not matter. They do. Getting up earlier is good, being less snappy in the evenings is genuinely good for the people who live with you, and Scripture is full of growth and calls for it constantly.

The difference is that growth is what happens inside the love, not what qualifies you for it. Rowan got better at handwriting. He is forty now and he writes beautifully. It happened after the kitchen, not before, and it happened because somebody smoothed card six out of the bin and said it was lovely.

There was a man five hundred years ago who spent years working on a version of himself fit to be loved by God, and who wrote afterward that the moment everything turned was when he understood that God does not find us lovely and then love us. God loves, and that is what makes a person lovely. He stopped drafting. He started living.