The Party You Cannot Face

The invitation has been on Chidinma's fridge for three weeks and she is not going to go.

She has not said so. She has left it slightly open in every conversation, the way you do, with a couple of well placed maybes and one reference to a thing that might clash, and nobody has pushed her because nobody pushes her about anything.

It is a good occasion. That is the part that makes this hard to explain to anybody. It is not a duty and it is not a work thing. These are her people, and something genuinely wonderful has happened for somebody she loves, and if you asked her whether she is glad about it she would say yes immediately and she would mean it entirely.

She cannot walk into that room.

Because of the question. There will be about forty people there and probably nine of them will ask her how things are going, warmly, in that specific bright way people ask at a celebration, and every one of them will be expecting a short pleasant answer because that is what the room is for.

And she has nothing to give them.

Not a story that works. Not a version that is short. She has one true sentence that would take the temperature of the room down about ten degrees and ruin somebody else's evening, and she is not going to do that to a person she loves on their night.

So she will not go, and she will send something lovely, and nobody will think anything of it, and she will be at home.

Now hear me before anything else.

I am not going to ask you how it happened. Not once, anywhere on this page. Whether it was your doing or somebody else's or a thing nobody could have seen makes no difference to a single word here, and there is no point at which you have to account for anything.

And nobody here is going to tell you to go to the party. I am not going to hand somebody a piece of homework that involves walking into a room full of people. You may know that room. You may be entirely right about it.

You have your own version. There is an occasion, and you have a plausible reason ready, and you have already decided.

Nobody here is auditing anything.

Notice who the feast was for

There is a party in that story that everybody remembers and almost nobody looks at properly.

And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry.Luke 15:23

Ask the plain question: what was being celebrated?

Not an achievement. Nothing had gone well. The son had lost everything, the family was demonstrably poorer than it had been, and if you had drawn up the accounts that evening they would have looked worse than they had in years.

The feast was not thrown for a success. It was thrown because somebody came back with nothing.

That is worth sitting in for a moment, because it inverts the entire logic of every room Chidinma is dreading. In her mind, celebrations are for people who have something to report. In that story, the biggest celebration in the whole chapter is for the person in the room with the least to report, and the father does not appear to notice the contradiction, because for him there is not one.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are what the celebration is about, not what would spoil it. That is not my flattery: the written word puts the feast around the one who came back empty, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land on a woman with an invitation on a fridge.

And there is joy in heaven over you right now. The word says likewise, joy shall be in heaven, and it says it in that same chapter about exactly this, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact rather than a picture, so it is true tonight while you are at home not going.

Your welcome was never priced

Here is what this whole set of messages exists to put in front of you, and it belongs here in the plainest possible terms.

Nothing about how you are received depends on what is in your hands.

Not by God, and if that room is any good, not by them either. You will notice that the older brother in the story is the one running an accounting system, and the father does not adopt it, and the text does not side with it.

And your standing did not move when everything else did. Not down: the word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, and it is the Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which is a statement about family and not about a year.

And nobody in heaven has a report to hear from you. The word says God is no respecter of persons, and the Spirit is the one who makes that reach a woman who has been dreading nine bright questions, because the questions were never the thing that determined how she is received anywhere that matters.