Rules and No Portrait

The dishes are done and the good part of Sunday has arrived, which is the part where nobody has anywhere to be.

Her grandson is seven and he is at the end of the kitchen table with a coloring page from church, working on Noah's ark. He has made all the animals purple, which he considers a decision and not a mistake. There is a ring of milk on the table by his elbow that neither of them is going to do anything about for a while. The ceiling fan turns. In the other room the ball game is on with the sound almost off.

He does not look up. He says, Grandma, what is Jesus like?

And she hears herself answer.

He does not like it when you lie.

That is what comes out. The boy says okay, and picks up a purple crayon again, and asks whether giraffes were on the boat, and the afternoon goes right on the way afternoons do.

She sits there with her coffee going cold in her hand.

Because it is true. Jesus is not fond of lying. She could give the reference. But she is sixty eight years old and she has been in a pew since she was carried into one, and a child asked her what the Lord is like and out of her whole life came a fence.

She starts going back through it while the fan turns. What she has taught these children. Say ma'am. Do not take the last one off the plate. Apologize and mean it, and mean it is the important half. Do not quit halfway. Do not lie, not even the small kind, not even the kind that saves somebody's feelings.

Every one of those is good. She would teach them all again tomorrow.

And she cannot remember one single time she sat with one of them and described Him. Not the rules He gave. Him. What He is like when somebody comes to Him after doing the very thing. What His face does. What He is like on your worst Tuesday.

Twelve rules and no portrait. She taught them the fence and never once walked them up to the house.

Maybe you know that feeling from the other end. Maybe you could recite what a Christian does not do, in order, since you were small, and if somebody stopped you at the sink tonight and asked you what God is actually like, you would find the shelf empty.

A fence tells you where the field ends

Let me say first that the rules were not the mistake. I am not here to take the fence down.

A fence is a real kindness to a child. It says here is where the road is and here is where the pond is. Everything on her list came out of love and most of it came out of somebody being hurt once.

But a fence has never told anybody what is inside the house. That is not its job, and asking it to do that job is how a person ends up sixty eight years old with a whole vocabulary for what God does not want and no sentence at all for who He is.

Scripture puts the change in a different place entirely. It says we are conformed to the image of His Son, and the Spirit of God is the one doing the conforming. You are being shaped toward a face and not toward a code of conduct. An image is a likeness of somebody. You cannot be conformed to a rule.

And here is what that costs when it is missing. A person can keep the whole fence and still have no idea what they are turning into. That is the ache in this category. If I did change, I am not sure I could tell you what I would be changing into. Of course not. Nobody handed you the portrait.

You have a Father who was never trying to keep you inside a line, and a fence was only ever the edge of His own yard. It is written that He is the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, and it is His Spirit who tells a person a thing like that in a way they can actually take in.

The verse hands you a face

Now look at what Jesus does with this, because He does not answer it the way we do.

Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.Luke 6:36

Read the shape of it. He does not give a threshold. He does not say be merciful four times a week, or here is how to tell whether your mercy counted. He points at a Person and says, that. Like Him.

You have been given a likeness to grow into and not a standard to clear, and the difference is the whole thing. Luke 6:36 sets the Father Himself as the pattern, and it is the Spirit and not your discipline who works a likeness into a person, which is why this can be good news to a tired woman instead of one more weight.

And notice what mercy is. Mercy is not a thing you stop doing. You cannot achieve mercy by subtraction. There is no amount of not lying that adds up to mercy, and that is the plain proof that the fence was never going to make anybody into Him.

So if the working definition of Christlikeness has been your faults taken away one at a time, what is left at the end of that is a person who does nothing, and that is not Jesus. He was the most merciful, the most present, the gladdest to see people, the least in a hurry with somebody's failure. Those are all things He did, not things He avoided.

You are being made into somebody who does something, and it is mercy, and it is already in you. That is what is written, and the Spirit who was on Christ in Nazareth is the one who puts His way of being into an ordinary woman at a kitchen table on a Sunday.

Nobody grows into a face they have never seen

Here is the part that matters for your grandchildren, and for you, which is the same part.

A child cannot want to be like somebody they have never met. Neither can a woman of sixty eight. So the question is not faithfulness. That has been in place since before your children were born. The question is where the eyes have been, yours and mine and everybody's. Forty years of looking at a fence, and the fence is what a person knows by heart.

Look at Him instead. Watch what He is like when the woman is dragged into the middle of the crowd. Watch what He is like with a man who denied Him to a servant girl by a fire and then had to eat breakfast on a beach with Him. There is no lecture on that beach. There is fish, and a question asked three times, and a job handed back.

You have been standing near a face like that your whole life, and the standing near is what does the changing. His word says that beholding is what transforms, and it is His Spirit doing the transforming, so there is nothing for you to manufacture and nothing to perform for a grandson.

And one plain thing, said up here in the daylight of the page. If this lands on you tonight as a ledger of everything you failed to give those children, and if it has not lifted by morning, put somebody else in this with you. Start at a doctor, because sorrow and lost sleep and getting older turn up wearing one another's clothes, and only one of the three can be measured. A counselor with room for the whole sixty eight years of it. Your pastor, or whichever friend is easiest to call at nine at night. And if the dark hours have run somewhere past regret, if the thinking has gone as far as whether this table would run smoother without you at the head of it, dial 988 before you turn the kitchen light off, or whatever crisis line answers in your town, and keep somebody close enough to sit down at this table. Reaching for a person is not a step away from God. In this house it is Him arriving.

You were given people on purpose, and a hand reaching toward you has never been a mark against you. The word says to bear one another's burdens, and it is the same Spirit at work in the one who picks up the phone as in the one who dials it.