Everything Off and Nothing On

There are eleven wire hangers on the rod and none of them have anything on them.

She has been at this since seven. The bed is covered, the fan is going, and three bags are tied off by the bedroom door for the thrift store drop box. She does this every couple of years and she is good at it. She can hold a blouse up, look at it for two seconds, and know.

And while her hands work, the other list runs, the one she never says out loud to anybody.

She quit the second glass years ago, and that one cost her something nobody ever knew about. She quit the shows that left her feeling like a hand had been in her chest. She quit the phone calls with the cousin who could get her going about her sister in under a minute, and quitting those calls took four years and two apologies. She quit the spending. She quit saying the thing that would land, even when it was true, even when she had it loaded and the other person had it coming.

Nineteen years of a believer's life, and she can list what is gone off it the way she can list what is going in a bag.

She sits down on the corner of the bed with a sweater in her lap and looks at the closet.

Eleven hangers. A rod. A shelf with a shoebox of photographs and one bad hat on it. And the thought arrives quietly, without any drama attached, the way the true ones do: she can name a dozen things she has taken off and she cannot name one thing she has been given.

Not one. Not a single garment. Nineteen years of subtracting, and the result is a bare rod on a Saturday morning with the fan going.

And you know that closet. Yours might be a list on the back of a journal page, or a set of accounts you keep in your head at two in the morning. You quit things. Real things, things with teeth in them, and the quitting was honest and it cost you. And somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like becoming somebody and started feeling like erasing somebody, and nobody ever put anything into your hands to wear.

Subtraction has never made a person

Let me name what happened here, because it is not a failure of nerve and it is not a lack of anything.

She learned the arithmetic that was taught to her. Most of us did. Somebody handed us a faith that came with an excellent list of what comes off, and no list at all of what goes on, and so the whole project of becoming like Jesus quietly turned into a project of becoming less. Less loud. Less hungry. Less trouble. And a person can subtract their way to zero and never once arrive at somebody.

I am not going to stand here and tell her the quitting was wasted. It was not. Some of those things were killing her slowly and she got out from under them. But nothing on earth has ever been made by removal alone. You do not carve a person the way you carve a stone, because a person is not what is left over when the wrong parts are gone.

You are being made into somebody, and that is a different operation entirely from being cleared out. Romans 8:29 says God predestined His people to be conformed to the image of His Son, which is a positive shape and not an absence, and the Spirit named all through that chapter is the one doing the conforming.

Paul wrote a wardrobe, not a chore chart

Now look at what the New Testament actually does when it gets to this, because it does not hand anybody a shorter list of prohibitions.

Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.Colossians 3:12-14

Read the order in that first line, because everything depends on it. As the elect of God, holy and beloved. That is not what she earns by wearing the clothes. That is who she already is, said out loud before one garment is named, and only then does the wardrobe get handed over.

You are already the elect of God, holy and beloved, and the clothes are given to somebody who is those things and not to somebody trying to become them. Colossians 3:12 puts the identity before the instruction in the same sentence, and it is the Spirit who fits the garment to the person, never the other way around.

And look at what the garments are. Not rules. Not behaviors to monitor. Mercy with a body in it, the old word says bowels, meaning the thing you feel in your gut when somebody's trouble reaches you. Kindness. A mind that is not busy defending its own size. Meekness, which is strength with a hand on the reins. Longsuffering, which is the willingness to still be there when it has stopped being interesting.

Those are not a checklist. That is a description of a Person, and the reason they read like a portrait is that they are one. She has been handed His coat.

You have a wardrobe waiting that you did not sew, and it fits the woman who is standing there with an empty rod. His word says put on, which is what a person does with something already made and already handed to them, and the Spirit is the one who brings it into the room.

What He is making, said out loud

So let me answer the question she never gets an answer to. If she did change, what would she be changing into?

Not a quieter woman. Not a smaller one. Somebody people are safe near. Somebody who is not in a hurry with a person who is talking slowly. Somebody whose first move, when she hears about a mess, is toward it rather than away. Somebody who can be told the truth about herself and not go cold for three days. Somebody with a big laugh that other people can get into.

That is a fuller human being, not a fainter one, and it is what Jesus is like. Look at Him with the woman at the well, with the children, with Peter on the beach after Peter had failed him in front of everybody. Nothing thin about Him anywhere.

You are being conformed to His image, and He is the most alive Person in Scripture. 2 Corinthians 3:18 says we are changed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, and the same verse hands the doing of it to the Lord who is the Spirit.

And if the emptiness in that bedroom is not just tiredness, if it has been sitting on her for months and the color has gone out of things she used to like, then let me say this as plainly as I know how. A human being brought in on it is no detour around what God is doing. He works through people, and this is one of those places. A doctor, because thyroid trouble and broken sleep and grief and pain shape a soul's weather more than most sermons admit. A counselor, who can sit with the same flatness week after week and see what a woman cannot see from inside it. One friend with the whole story and not the tidied one. And if the quiet in that room has moved past regret and settled into an idea that the people in her life would find everything simpler without her, do not let the night go by alone. 988 will answer tonight, by text or by call, and so will a crisis line, and somebody can be in the house until morning. That is not a change of subject. In front of an empty closet it is the subject.

You were never asked to build a self out of what you gave up, and you were never left with nothing. Ephesians 4:24 says the new self is put on, handed over, created after God in righteousness, and it is His Spirit who does the creating.