They Kept Saying My Name After I Left

He was between the freezers and the tills and he was not going to be recognized, and then he was.

Six years. It is a woman who used to do the tea and who is now, from the look of it, about eighty, and she said his name with a rising inflection that made it a question, and he said hello, and there was the pause that always comes next.

He has an exit line for these. He has used it maybe nine times. It involves work, and being on his way, and it is warm and it is entirely closed.

And before he could get to it, she said the thing.

She said: you are still on the Thursday list, love. We do it every week. Marjorie reads it.

And then she said something about the car park being terrible, and went, with her trolley, in the way that eighty year old women do, having detonated something in a man between the freezers and the tills.

Six years.

He did not leave quietly. There was a meeting and then a second meeting and then a thing he said in a corridor to somebody's face that he has thought about at three in the morning more times than he would admit. He was not entirely wrong. He was not remotely fair.

He assumed, and had assumed for six years without ever examining it, that his name had been taken off things.

He sat in the car for a while before he started it. The shopping was in the back and there was something frozen in it and he did not care.

Without ceasing I have remembrance of thee

Sit in the car a minute, because there is an opening line in a letter to a young man that does the same thing that woman did to you at the tills.

I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my prayers night and day.2 Timothy 1:3

Without ceasing. Night and day.

Paul is in prison. Timothy is elsewhere, and the situation between them is complicated and there is grief in that letter and there are things unsaid.

And the first thing he tells him, before the encouragement and before the requests and before anything else, is: I have been carrying your name, and I have not stopped, and I do it at night as well.

Hear this with the engine off. You were never written off, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts a man's name in another man's mouth night and day across distance and difficulty, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying whatever Marjorie says on a Thursday in a room you cannot picture any more.

Now let me name the assumption, because six years of a life have been built on it and you never once inspected it.

You assumed the list was for members. You assumed leaving badly removes you from it, the way it removes you from a rota, and that somebody, at some point, drew a line through your name, probably kindly, probably with a small sad remark.

Nobody did that. It did not occur to them, because a prayer list is not a membership roll and was never doing what you thought it was doing.

Hear this too, and let it get into the six years. You are not remembered because you deserved to be, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has an apostle carrying a name without ceasing rather than as a reward, and the Spirit of God has never once removed a person from His attention on the grounds of how they left a building.

And now the corridor, because it is three in the morning that makes this hard and not the leaving.

What you said in that corridor is still what you said in that corridor. Nothing about a Thursday list undoes it, nothing in the written word pretends otherwise, and the Holy Spirit is not in the business of talking a man out of what he knows. You have already told me it was not remotely fair and you were right.

But here is the thing that has actually changed today, and it is enormous.

You have been carrying it in a world where you were struck off. Where the sentence was said and the door closed and the whole thing has been sitting in a sealed room for six years with nothing coming in or out, and the written word describes no such room, and the Holy Spirit has been going in and out of it every Thursday.

That world does not exist. In the real one, a woman with a trolley knows your name, and Marjorie reads it out on a Thursday, and has done, and it has never been anything to anybody except ordinary.