The Christening and the Whole Family

The party is at Auntie Vi's because it is always at Auntie Vi's, and the canopy will go up on Friday night, and by two o'clock on Saturday there will be sixty people in that yard.

The baby is Marcia's. She is Kaydene's cousin, and Kaydene has been asked to hold the baby for the photographs, which means she is not on the edge of this day, she is in the middle of it.

The christening itself is at eleven and takes an hour and is the easy part. It is the yard afterward. Two until whenever. Music from a speaker on the kitchen windowsill. A table of food that does not stop. Dominoes at four. Somebody's uncle who will start the same argument he starts every year at about six. And running the whole way through it, from two o'clock until the last person leaves, the drinking, which in that yard is not a feature of the day, it is the shape of it.

Kaydene has been to this yard her whole life. That is what makes it hard. She does not arrive as a guest, she arrives as somebody with thirty years of history in it, and a version of her lives in that yard that she is no longer, and everybody there met that version first.

She wants to go. She wants to hold that baby.

It is Wednesday. The canopy is not up yet.

You know that day. It might be a christening, a wedding, a family Christmas, a homecoming. It is not an event with drinking at it. It is a day whose whole structure is the drinking, and you belong to the people in it, and you cannot separate the two things.

You are going through and you were never going to be routed around, and He said so before you got there. Isaiah says when thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and the word is when, which settles the passing through and puts all the weight on the company; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live promise about a yard with a canopy in it.

When thou passest through the waters

Let me put the weight into words, because it is not the same weight as a room full of strangers.

Strangers are easy. Strangers have no file on you. Family have thirty years of file, and the version of you they filed is not this one, and you cannot correct it and you cannot argue with it and you cannot ask sixty people to update it. And so what you are actually walking into on Saturday is not a yard. It is a yard full of people who love you and know a former you, and the whole afternoon is you being present as somebody they have not entirely met.

Here is what God says, and look at the small word at the front.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.Isaiah 43:2

When. Not if. He is not offering to arrange your life so that there is no water. He has already settled that there will be water and that you will be in it, and He has moved the entire promise off the question of whether and onto the question of who is with you.

You are going through something God has already accounted for, and you were never promised a route that avoided it. That is what stands written in Isaiah 43, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that honest rather than disappointing for a woman looking at Saturday.

And through. Through is a direction with an end on it. You do not go through something and stay in it. Every one of those pictures, waters, rivers, fire, is a thing with a far side, and God's language assumes the far side the whole way. Saturday has a far side. It is called Sunday morning, and you will be standing on it.

You are inside something with a far side, and you were never being asked to live in it permanently. Scripture uses through four times in one verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the far side visible from the middle of a yard at six in the evening.

Now the promise itself. They shall not overflow thee. Not the water will not rise. It will. It says it will not overflow you, which is a statement about what the water is permitted to do to a person, not about the weather. God is not managing the yard on Saturday. He is managing what the yard can do to you.

You are protected in what it can do to you, and you were never told the day would be made easy first. The written word says they shall not overflow thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one enforcing that boundary between a party and a person all afternoon.

And the plain things, which we say every time on this site and mean. You owe nobody in that yard an explanation, not one auntie, not the uncle at six o'clock. If somebody presses, one short sentence and no reasons is the whole answer. Tell one person who will be there, if you want to, so you are not the only one who knows. And the friend, the doctor, the counselor, the room with the circle of chairs, all of that is God's kindness with a face on it, and there is no version of using it that makes your faith smaller. And you can leave. Go at six, go before the argument, go after the photographs. Leaving is not a failure and never was.