Somebody Said He Would Not Come This Time

There is a man at the feed store who talks to everybody and means no harm by any of it, and I want to say that first because I do not want this to be a story about a bad man.

I was in there with my dad in March and Dad had gone to the counter, and this man was leaning on the sacks the way he does, and he said, in a friendly way, that he had heard about our goat and that he supposed my dad would get sick of it sooner or later and that would be that.

He was not being cruel. He was making conversation. He said it the way people say that winter is coming.

I did not say anything back because I was nine and because I could not think of anything, and then Dad came over and we bought what we came for and we went home.

I carried that sentence around for eleven days.

I did not tell anybody about it. That is the part I would do differently. It went round and round and it got bigger, the way a sentence does when it is only ever inside one head, and by about the eighth day it was not what he had said anymore, it was a thing I had built out of what he said.

Bucky got out on the twelfth day, on a Wednesday evening, in the rain. And I stood in the kitchen doorway and I watched my dad look out at the weather and put his coat on.

And I said, out loud, before I had decided to, whether he was going to get sick of it sooner or later.

He stopped with one arm in the coat. And he asked me who said that. And I told him. And he stood there for a bit and then he said, get your boots, you are coming.

We were out for an hour and a half in that rain. He did not say very much. But at one point, up by the elder, with the water coming off the brim of his hat, he said that he had known that man forty years and that he was a decent man who says things, and that the difference between a man who says things and a man in a field in the rain is the field.

The list, and what is on it

Paul does something at the end of Romans 8 that reads like a man going round a house checking windows.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38, 39)

Count them. Ten items, and they are arranged in pairs of opposites so that between each pair there is nothing left over. Death and life. Present and future. Height and depth.

And then, because he can hear somebody about to say but what about, he adds the one that closes it: nor any other creature. Anything made. If it is a created thing, it is on the list, and the list is of things that cannot.

You are not standing outside a love that keeps a list of exceptions. Romans 8:39 puts every created thing inside one clause and rules the whole clause out, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an exhaustive list read as safety rather than as argument.

A man leaning on a sack at a feed store is a created thing. So is a sentence he said without meaning much by it. So is the version of that sentence a nine year old builds over eleven days, which is a real object and which does real work and which is still on the list.

You have not been separated by anything anybody has said about you. The written word puts creatures on the list of what cannot, and His Spirit is what makes that specific instead of general in the mind of the person carrying the sentence.

Why he says persuaded

The first three words of that passage are doing something and almost everybody reads past them.

I am persuaded. Not I feel. Not I hope. Persuaded is a word about having been argued into a position by evidence, and Paul spends the previous thirty verses laying out the evidence before he uses it.

That matters, because it means the confidence at the end of Romans 8 is not a mood. It is a conclusion, and a conclusion can be revisited on a bad day, which is exactly what a person needs when the feeling has gone.

You are holding a conclusion rather than a feeling, and conclusions survive weather. Romans 8:38 opens with persuasion rather than with sentiment, and the Spirit of God is what makes a conclusion carry when the mood underneath it is gone.

And the ground of the whole thing is put earlier in the chapter as a question with an answer built into it: He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?

You have been given the argument as well as the comfort, and the argument is older than any sentence somebody handed you. Romans 8:32 reasons from the biggest thing to the smaller ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves reasoning like that from the page into an eleven day loop in somebody's head.