I Joined Last Year And Still Feel Like A Guest

Fourteen months and he can find no fault in the situation, which is precisely the difficulty.

They have been welcoming in every measurable way. He was invited to things early. Two families have had him for a meal. People use his name reliably and have done since about month three, which he noticed and which is better than most places manage.

He has been asked twice about serving in something, which he took as a compliment and gave a straightforward answer to, and both times it was received well.

Nothing is wrong. He has audited it carefully, more than once, because that is what he does.

And he stands in that hall after a service, with coffee, in a group of four, and he is a guest.

Not visibly. He is perfectly capable of being in a conversation. Somebody watching would see a man at ease.

Internally there is a distinction he cannot get rid of, a small persistent line between himself and the room, and after fourteen months it has begun to look permanent rather than temporary. And he has started to build a theory about that, because he builds theories: that some people arrive somewhere and become part of it and others do not, and that whatever that mechanism is he does not have it, and that fourteen months is long enough to know.

What is not on this page

Let me be precise before anything else, because you will check my footing and you should.

Nothing here is going to reassure you that they like you. I do not know them, and you have already established that they behave well, and reassurance would land exactly where you predict it would.

And nothing here is going to suggest you serve in something to feel more settled, or stay longer, or try harder socially.

And nothing here is going to ask you for anything at all beyond one small thing with your hands.

You are not being reassured and nothing here makes time or effort or participation the proof of your place. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in the voice of three verbs, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to feel settled before He would deal with him.

Three passive verbs

Here is the sentence, and the grammar is the whole of it.

Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.Colossians 2:7

Rooted. Built up. Stablished.

All three are passive. Something is being done to a person in that sentence and the person is not the one doing it. Nobody roots themselves. A plant does not root itself into ground, it is rooted, and the rooting is a thing that happens to it over time and largely underground and without any awareness on the plant's part.

And notice built up, which is the same construction Peter uses about stones, and stablished, which means made firm.

Three verbs, three passives, and in every one of them the subject is somebody other than the reader.

You are being rooted, built up and established by somebody else, in three passive verbs in a row, and none of it depends on your sense that it is happening. I am not stretching that. Colossians 2:7 stacks three passives, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man standing in a hall with a coffee in a group of four.

Roots are underground

Now the thing that follows from the image, and it is the specific answer to fourteen months.

A rooting is not visible to the plant. That is not a poetic flourish, it is what roots are. The activity is entirely below the surface and the plant has no access to the information.

Which means an internal sense of not being rooted is not a report on the rooting. It cannot be. There is no instrument in a plant for detecting root growth and there is no instrument in you for detecting this either.

You have been treating an internal impression as data about an underground process, and it was never able to be that, and its persistence for fourteen months is not evidence about anything except how long fourteen months is.

You have been reading a feeling as a report on a process that is by definition not observable from where you are standing. That is Colossians 2:7 in its own image, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that hall every Sunday for fourteen months and is not waiting for you to notice anything.

And your theory has a flaw in it

One more thing, and I offer it in the register you actually work in.

Your theory is that some people have a mechanism for becoming part of a place and others do not, and that you lack it, and that fourteen months is a sufficient sample.

The flaw is not the sample size. It is that the theory takes the internal impression as the dependent variable, and there is no reason to think that impression tracks the thing you actually want to know about.

You would not accept that from anybody else. If a colleague told you they had established a fact about an underground process by consulting how they felt about it on Sunday mornings, you would be, at minimum, curious about the method.

You have been running a method you would not accept from anybody else, and Scripture puts the process in three passive verbs specifically to take it out of your hands. The word says rooted rather than rooting yourself, and the Spirit who bears witness with our spirit is not consulting your impression before proceeding.