The Chart in the Fellowship Hall

It was about nine feet long and it started behind the tea urn.

Arrows. Boxes. A section in red that she was frightened of before she could read what it said. Somebody had drawn it by hand on lining paper and then it had been laminated in sections, and the laminate had gone yellow at the joins, and it was there the whole of her childhood and for years afterward.

She can draw it now. She has never tried, and she knows she could.

Nobody in that church was cruel. She wants that understood. They were kind people and they fed her and they taught her to sing, and the man whose chart it was had spent thirty years studying and genuinely believed he was helping.

But she grew up in a room with a diagram of the end of the world on the wall, at the height where a child looks.

She is forty one and here is the shape of what it did, which took her a long time to see because it does not look like damage from the outside. She cannot enjoy a good thing without a part of her standing slightly back from it. A holiday booked. A new job. Her daughter's first proper achievement. There is always something in her that does not fully arrive, and its position is roughly: do not settle into this.

She has said that to two people in her life and both of them thought she was describing anxiety, which is close and not the same.

Sit down. There is a sentence that takes the chart off the wall, and it was said by Christ about Himself.

Not even the Son

Here it is, and read who is included.

But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.Mark 13:32

Not the angels. Not the Son. Only the Father.

Christ is speaking, about Himself, in the middle of the discourse that every chart in every fellowship hall is built from. He is standing inside the very passage the man with the lining paper was working from, and He says that the timing is not something He has been given to hand over.

That is not a hint that a careful reader could get past. It is a closure, and He put Himself inside it, which is the strongest way of shutting a subject that language allows.

You were raised under a diagram of something Christ declined to diagram. Mark 13:32 puts the day with the Father only, and the Spirit inspired the record of Christ excluding Himself so that no chart could ever borrow His authority.

What the chart taught, which was not the chart

Now the effect, because the arrows are not what damaged you.

Nobody in that church could have told you the point of the chart was to make a child unable to settle into a good thing. That was not on the lining paper. It happened underneath.

What a diagram like that teaches a child, without saying it, is that the present is provisional. That everything currently visible is a stage in a sequence that ends, and that the sensible posture toward any of it is not to invest. Children do not learn that as a doctrine. They learn it as a stance, and stances go in deeper and last longer.

Forty one years old, standing slightly back from her own daughter's achievement, is what that stance looks like once it is fully grown.

You were not given a faulty doctrine so much as a faulty posture. Nothing written anywhere asks anybody to hold their own life at arm's length, and the Spirit is described as producing joy and peace rather than a permanent readiness to leave.

What replaces it

Here is the practical part and it is not a new diagram.

What goes in the space is a sentence rather than a picture, because the picture is what is already there and it will not be displaced by a better one.

The sentence is this: the day belongs to the Father, and He has not put it into anybody's hands to announce. Say it out loud when you notice yourself standing back. Not as an argument with your childhood. As a statement of who holds what.

And then do the thing you were standing back from. Enjoy the holiday. Be pleased about the job in the way a person is pleased. Look at your daughter's achievement with your whole attention.

You are permitted to settle into a good thing. Nothing written anywhere makes provisional living the mark of faith, and the Spirit is not the origin of the small step backward you take at every good moment.

That is not carelessness. Nobody in Scripture who was actually expecting Christ was told to stop planting or stop marrying or stop being glad. The opposite instruction is the one that appears.

And there is something worth saying about the man with the lining paper, because he is not the villain here either. He gave thirty years to a subject because he wanted people to be ready and to know what was coming, and the arrows were an act of care as far as he was concerned. What he could not see, and what almost nobody sees, is that the format of a diagram makes an implicit claim that the content never makes. A chart says: this is known. And Christ said, about that exact subject, that it is not, which means the wall was contradicting the passage it was drawn from.

Which is why nothing here is going to replace it with a better arrangement of arrows. There are people who would tell you the chart was right in outline and wrong in its details, and other people who would redraw the whole sequence a different way, and that argument has been running a very long time and this page is not entering it in any direction. The correction to a diagram of something nobody was shown is not a better diagram. It is one sentence about who holds the day, and then an ordinary Tuesday lived without a step backward in it.