He Has Not Changed What He Calls Me

In one week Ngozi was called two different things and both people meant it.

On the Tuesday, at a meeting she should probably not have gone to, somebody used a word about her in the third person while she was four feet away. Not cruelly. In passing, as a way of identifying which person was being discussed. It was a compressed and slightly cold word and it was doing the job of a name.

On the Friday, alone, at about six in the morning, she was reading and a sentence went into her like a nail. It was one of those ordinary phrases that has been in front of a person a hundred times and then one morning is not ordinary at all. And what it called her was not the word from the Tuesday.

Here is what she noticed, and it is the reason this article exists.

She lived out of the Tuesday word for the rest of the week.

Not by choosing to. She would have said, if asked, that the Friday sentence was true and the Tuesday word was a person being careless. She believed that. She could have argued it well.

And she still walked into a room on the Saturday holding herself the way the Tuesday word holds a person: slightly braced, slightly smaller, arriving with an implicit apology and leaving before the end.

Because a thing said about you by a room has a weight that a thing read alone does not, and everybody knows this and almost nobody says it. The room's version arrives with witnesses. The other one arrives with nobody, at six in the morning, and has to be taken on its own.

And this is where I stop writing about Ngozi, because you have been called two things as well.

I am not going to ask what the room said. That is yours and it stays yours.

Where the acceptance is kept

I want to give you a short phrase and then show you what it is fastened to, because the fastening is the whole reason it holds.

To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.Ephesians 1:6

Accepted in the beloved.

Not accepted on review. Not accepted pending. And crucially, not accepted in yourself, which is where every version of this you have tried to believe has quietly been located and is why it has never survived a Tuesday. Ephesians 1 puts it somewhere else entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on the place it is kept.

In the beloved. The acceptance is held inside somebody else, and what happens to it is whatever happens to Him, and nothing that a room says about you reaches into that place.

And look at the first half of the verse, because Paul tells you what it is all for: to the praise of the glory of his grace. The whole arrangement exists to display something about God rather than something about you, which means it cannot be adjusted according to your week without wrecking its own purpose.

So take that where you actually walked in on the Saturday. You are accepted in the beloved right now, and Ephesians 1:6 says God made it so, and the Holy Spirit is the one who seals that in a person, which is exactly what the same chapter says a few verses later.

Now the honest part.

Ephesians 1:6 does not say the room revises its word. It says nothing about the meeting, or about the person who used it, or about whether they will ever think differently. That is not the offer, and any message that promises it is trading a certainty for a maybe.

What is on offer is that the acceptance was made, past tense, and made in Christ, and the written word puts it out of reach of Tuesdays. The Spirit of God has been holding it there since long before that meeting.