YOU ARE WHO GOD SAYS YOU ARE...UNLESS YOU READ THE COMMENTS SECTION
The sign above the vape shop had been flickering since March. Next door, the sign for the church did not flicker, mostly because Deacon Fitz had rewired it himself using a YouTube tutorial and prayer (the neon sign that is, not the handwritten one, of course – the handwritten one said “Non-Denominational, All Welcome, Parking In Front Only Please Ms. Debra We See You”). Fitz’s repair had held steady for two years running, which everyone agreed was a miracle roughly on par with the parting of the Red Sea, if the Red Sea had been a strip mall electrical panel from 1987.
It was quieter than usual in the fellowship hall that Tuesday, on account of Sister Velma having confiscated the church's only leaf blower after Brother Rooster attempted to use it to, in his words, "speed up baptisms." Velma had taken the leaf blower away with the calm of a woman who had confiscated many things in her time and expected to confiscate many more. For tonight’s nourishment during class, people had brought in three grocery sacks, two gallons of sweet tea, an industrial-size box of Goldfish crackers, and—somehow—a live fern. Nobody asked about the fern. Experience had taught them that every answer from Big Meech only generated two additional questions.
Bible Study had officially started fifteen minutes ago, but they hadn’t gotten very far yet. Sometimes,somebody would ask a real question before the curriculum got a chance, and the curriculum would spend the rest of the night sitting there, decoratively, like a fruit bowl nobody was going to eat from. Granted, Big Meech had once tried to eat one of the plastic grapes during a Bible study on self-control. He claimed afterward that the lesson had been unforgettable.
Tonight, Earl had been at the coffee station, which consisted of a regular off-brand Mr. Coffee plugged into the wall, stirring something that had gone past coffee and more like roofing material, when Anna came in and sat down. She looked like a woman doing long division in her head and not liking the remainder. While she was still thinking about whether to speak, Marcus rubbed his hands together like a man about to lift something heavy. He was a big man who worked at the loading docks over off Lamar. His shoulders were up around his ears like a man bracing to get hit.
"Can I ask something?"
"You just did," Earl said.
"You know what I mean."
Peaches let his chair come down onto all four legs. "Go on."
Marcus looked at the table instead of anybody's face. "I messed up this week. I've said sorry where I needed to say it. I know God's forgiven me." He paused long enough that a couple people almost filled it for him, and then didn't. "But does He still actually think I'm one of His good ones? Or is that a different question than forgiveness?"
Anna spoke before anybody else could. "I was wondering almost exactly that, actually. Not because I did anything huge this week. I just keep feeling like God looks at me the way you'd look at a renovation project He's stuck finishing. Like every morning, He wakes up a little disappointed that He's still got to work on me."
Earl set down his stirring spoon. "Well. That's already one thing you and God disagree on."
"What?"
"You said what you think. I'm just telling you it don't line up with what He thinks. Somebody's math is off, and it ain't His."
Zeke put his Greek flashcards down (ἁγιάζω was on top, which felt, to Zeke, like the Holy Spirit was up to something) and said, "There it is. Two different stories, same question about if His opinion of you moves around as much as yours does. Colossians says you're complete in Christ. Complete. Not becoming complete. Not mostly complete, pending a few outstanding renovations." He glanced at Anna. "Complete. And Hebrews 10:10 and Hebrews 10:14 back him up – you are sanctified, through the offering of Jesus's body, once for all.”
Marcus sat with that a second, and his shoulders came down maybe half an inch, which for Marcus was practically a full-body collapse of relief. "Then why do I feel like garbage?"
"'Cause feelings don't read Greek," Zeke said. "Feelings are real, don't get me wrong, God ain't asking you to pretend you feel fine when you don't. But feelings are a weather report, and Colossians 1:22 is bedrock. I used to think the whole Christian life was Jesus saying, 'Congratulations, you're forgiven—now spend the next sixty years trying real hard not to embarrass Me.' I had Him grading my homework. 'You only prayed twenty-three minutes today. That's a B-minus. Also I noticed you got heated in traffic on 240.' Paul says God already made you holy, blameless, and above reproach in His sight. That's not your review pending. That's the verdict, already read, already final, and you weren't even in the room when the gavel came down, 'cause Jesus stood in for you. That's the part people miss. He's not updating His opinion of you based on this morning's traffic incident. The Cross settled it, and He's not walking it back."
One of the fellowship hall cabinet doors drifted open by about three inches. Two little possum eyes blinked from the darkness. Earl glanced over.
"Evenin', Lazarus."
The cabinet door slowly closed again.
Anna looked up. "Was..."
"Yep."
"Should somebody..."
"Nah. He's got office hours."
Peaches leaned forward onto his elbows. "Back to what we were talking about: It's like wrestling."
Marcus groaned. "Everything's wrestling with you."
"Everything can be wrestling, if you let it. You’ve got to follow the booking. You ever see a guy get a monster push—company decides he's the guy to feature who’ll sell the most tickets for them, gives him the music, the entrance, the whole nine—and then for the first few months he's still wrestling like the mid-carder he used to be? Flinching at contact. Apologizing with his eyes. Boy, somebody's gotta tell him: they already changed the marquee. You ain't waiting to become the guy. Company already said you're the guy. Now you just gotta walk out there like you believe the poster. You have victory in Jesus. The belt's not even yours 'cause you won it. It's yours 'cause somebody else won it and put it on you. You can't get pinned and lose it, 'cause you ain't the one who earned it either."
"That's what this Greek word means," Zeke added. "Sanctified. Set apart. It ain't a growth chart, it's an address. You already live there. The whole Christian life after that is just finding out the address is real."
Big Meech scratched his chin, working through it, too. "So God put a championship belt on me before I'd even learned my entrance music."
Velma pointed her plastic cake knife at him like she was knighting him. "Exactly that."
"I also remembered napkins."
"You remembered most of the napkins."
"That's growth, Velma."
Marcus laughed. "So what, I just believe it and everything's fixed?"
"Naw," Peaches said. "You believe it, and then you spend the rest of your life getting more and more convinced He was right about you, 'cause He never once changes His mind. That's the walk. He already knows how good this ends. You're just catching up to the ending."
"He is responsible for the facts," Zeke said. "He can't be surprised by you, Marcus. He made you shiny and new so you can do the new good things that the new ‘you’ wants to do."
Marcus sat there a long moment, big hands folded, looking younger than his shoulders let on. "Alright," he said finally. "Alright. I hear you."
"Good," Peaches said, straightening up off the doorframe. "'Cause Big Meech needs help unloading juice boxes for Sunday. You mind helpin’ him, please?"
"You set me up."
"Man, I'm a pastor. Setting people up for their own good is in the job description, right after 'wear the good suit for weddings' and 'pretend you don't know what half the congregation does on Saturday nights.'"
That got the table laughing, and it took Anna a minute to come back around to her question once it died down. "I think I'm... improving."
"That's exactly where the trouble starts," Peaches said, not unkindly.
"So why do I still feel unfinished, then?"
Earl picked up one of the paper plates off the stack and held it up like Exhibit A. "Say I decide this plate's dirty. Is it dirty?"
"No," said Rooster, playing along.
"But I might refuse to eat off it anyway."
"Wrong belief. Right plate."
"There it is."
Velma nodded along. "Same deal with a mirror. Smear it up with axle grease, and your face doesn't change one bit—the mirror's just lying to you at that point."
A tiny gray paw reached over the edge of the cabinet behind her and stole an entire stack of Styrofoam bowls.
Earl didn't even turn around.
"Leave him be. Winter's comin'."
Anna whispered, "...it's July."
Earl nodded.
"Possums don't own calendars."
Rooster, who'd been unusually quiet up to this point—storing energy, evidently—finally raised a finger. "I got one."
Everybody turned.
"My phone’s GPS told me one time I was standing in Walmart. I was inside Buc-ee's. Eating brisket. Nowhere near a Walmart."
Nobody said anything for a second, and then Peaches started laughing before Rooster even got to the point, because he could see it coming. "That’s perfect."
"GPS was wrong," Rooster said, leaning back, clearly having waited a long while for the right room to land this in. "I wasn't. I'm still wherever I actually am. Don't matter what the little dot says."
Marcus looked around the table, doing the math out loud. "So we're all basically saying the same thing. God already decided to make us good when we were born again, whether we feel like ‘good people’ yet or not. We're just the slow ones catching up."
"Hebrews says sanctified," Zeke said, ticking it off. "Paul says that too, as well as complete, holy, and blameless. Those aren't goals sitting out there somewhere waiting on you to reach them. They're descriptions of where you already are. If you think you’re dirty and far from God, you will act that way, and it won’t feel right, because you were clean and united with Him all along ever since you believed."
Anna sat with that for a moment. "So discipleship isn't becoming somebody else."
"No," Peaches said. "It's finding out who Jesus already made you and quitting the search everywhere else. Anna, let me ask you something. Suppose Big Meech comes strolling in here right now wearing one of those little plastic mustaches from the Dollar Tree."
Nobody at the table questioned the premise. This was, on any given Tuesday, well within the realm of things Big Meech might do.
"And suppose he says, 'I'm not Big Meech. Never heard of him. I'm an insurance adjuster named Leonard.'"
Brother Rooster scratched his head. "But he'd still be Big Meech."
"Right."
"He'd just be Big Meech lying about it."
"Exactly."
Peaches waited for the commotion to settle before he went on. "Identity doesn't change because somebody's decided to believe something dumb about it. Meech, you know I love you, Brother, and you know that you've believed some dumb things in your life."
"I have believed a great many dumb things, especially before I got here," Meech agreed. "I thought possums were just unemployed raccoons for a solid two years."
"We're aware."
"But none of that changed who I was."
"No. You were still Big Meech."
"Exactly. I just lived and learned. Don't hand me nothing else edible-looking, Earl. But why's God still teaching us anything, if we're already complete?"
"Because He's introducing you," Peaches said, "to you."
Nobody rushed to fill the quiet that followed.
"It's not a Father trying to turn an orphan into a son," he went on. "It's a Father convincing a son he's really home, and he can stop checking the locks. It's not a King hiring servants. It's a King teaching His own kids who they already are, so they'll quit acting like the help."
"It's not Jesus saying maybe one day you'll be lovable enough," Zeke said, quieter now. "It's Jesus saying He loved you before you knew His name to say it back."
Velma nodded slowly, like something had settled into place that she'd been circling for a while. "That explains something I've noticed. The unhappiest Christians I know are the ones always out there measuring themselves. The happiest ones got distracted discovering Him instead."
Earl finished off whatever his coffee had evolved into by now. "I've noticed the folks who think God's perpetually disappointed in 'em end up disappointed in everybody else too, eventually. But the ones who finally believe He actually likes them—they get to be the easiest people in the building to be around. It rubs off."
Big Meech, looking out the window toward the parking lot, said, "When I was a kid, my grandma had this old radio. I thought it was broken. Every station came in fuzzy no matter what she did to it."
"What was actually wrong with it?" Marcus asked.
"Nothing. Antenna was just folded down flat the whole time. Music had been playing all along. We just weren't set up to catch it."
Nobody rushed to talk over that one. Earl finally broke it, quieter than his usual register. "That's probably the whole Christian life, right there. God's not changing His mind about you week to week. We’re just unfolding our antennae."
Peaches smiled like a man who'd been handed the last line of his own sermon by somebody who didn't know he was preaching. "That's the walk, right there. God's not gradually deciding to love you more. He's not moving you up from bronze member to platinum saint on some point system. He's not reviewing your file every Friday to see if you earned the weekend. Jesus finished the work.”
Velma slid another slice of pound cake onto Marcus's plate without being asked, which from Velma was the equivalent of a hug. "So. You gonna believe Him, or your feelings?"
Marcus smiled for the first time all night—the real kind, not the polite kind he'd walked in wearing. "Working on it."
"That's alright," Peaches said, tipping his chair back again, immediately drawing a look from Velma that could've stripped paint. "He already finished the work. You're just catching up to it. Whole rest of your life to do it in, and He's not going anywhere while you do."
"So if we're already complete in Christ," Big Meech said, "does that mean I can quit buying self-help books?"
Velma didn't even look up. "Those books have been holding your washing machine level since March."
"Well—"
"They've already fulfilled their highest calling."
Peaches laughed. Outside, somebody came out of the vape shop holding a bag that promised, in letters too excited for their own good, EXTREME MANGO THUNDER ICE.
Earl watched him go. "Poor fella."
"What?"
"That sounds like it was invented during a concussion."
Peaches said, "Different strokes for different folks. Whole world's out there looking for something to fill a hole," he said. "And the Church's whole job is telling them the good news got here first."
Big Meech reached into the cabinet for another sleeve of cups.
"Excuse me, Lazarus."
Tiny hiss.
"Sorry."
He reached into the cabinet below instead.
"He's reorganizin'."
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