Chosen Before The Audition

Card sixty-two had gone soft at the corner where her thumb kept working at it.

Marisol had been in the corridor since twenty past eight. Radiator ticking. Somebody two doors down running the same four bars over and over with the pedal down, which is a sound that gets into your teeth after an hour. A man opposite her with a cello case between his knees, asleep, or doing a very good impression of it.

Two minutes each. That was the format. Two minutes, and they might stop you before the end, and being stopped before the end meant nothing, and everyone in the corridor knew it meant nothing, and everyone in the corridor was quietly certain it meant something.

She had practiced the first passage four thousand times. She had counted, some months, in a notebook. She knew where the panel would be sitting because her teacher had described the room. She knew what she would do with her hands in the silence before she started.

She went in. She played. Fifty seconds in, one of them wrote something.

She has never in her life been more awake than she was for those two minutes, and she came out into the corridor afterward with her ears ringing and no idea whether she had done well, and she sat on the radiator and shook.

Six months later, in her second term, she was in an office about a timetable and the head of department was hunting for a form, and she said, without looking up, "Oh, you were never in question. We had you off the November recordings. Everyone in that corridor had already been decided, poor things. The day is mostly for the panel."

Marisol said, "Sorry, what?"

"The letter was written before the audition. We just cannot post it before, or nobody would turn up and play properly."

And she went back to hunting for the form.

Marisol walked out through the practice rooms and stood in the stairwell for a while.

She did not feel cheated. That was the strange thing. What she felt was a kind of grief for the girl in the corridor, working her thumb into the corner of a card, believing that everything she was rested on the next hundred and twenty seconds. Nobody had lied to her. It was just that the truth had been sitting in a drawer in an office the whole time, and the whole time she had been auditioning for a place she already had.

And if you have been walking with God the way that girl sat in that corridor, I want to sit down beside you on the radiator, because I think there is a letter you have not been told about.

The letter was written in November

Jesus says it flat out, to men who were fairly sure they had signed up for something.

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.John 15:16

Look at the verbs and look at when they happened. Chose. Appointed. Both behind Him as He says it. He is not describing a process they are inside. He is telling them the outcome of something already concluded, in a room they were not in, before they had done anything worth writing down.

And then look at what follows the choosing, because this is where the relief turns into something better than relief. He does not say I chose you, now let us see. He says I chose you and appointed you that you should go. The purpose came attached. The place was already named on the day the decision was made.

You were chosen, and it happened before the two minutes you have been so frightened of. That is not my encouragement, it is what Jesus said in John 15 with the verbs in the past tense. What makes a sentence like that settle in a person instead of skating off is His Spirit, and never the warmth of my telling you.

Now go back much further, to the oldest picture of somebody being set apart, because the order of it is the whole teaching.

Leviticus 8. Aaron and his sons at the door of the tent, and the whole assembly gathered to watch, and here is what happens in order. Moses washes them with water. Moses dresses them, coat and sash and robe, the whole thing, and ties it on. Moses pours the anointing oil. And then he takes blood and puts it on the tip of the right ear, and on the thumb of the right hand, and on the big toe of the right foot.

Read that list again and notice who is doing the verbs. Every single one of them is Moses. Not one of those men demonstrated anything. Nobody played two minutes. There was no part of that morning where Aaron proved he could handle it, and the entire nation stood there and watched the whole thing happen to him.

And notice which parts got touched. The ear. The thumb. The foot. Hearing, handling, going. The three parts a person actually works with, marked out before a single day of the work had been done, which means the purpose was named first and the performance came after and was never the qualifier.

You were set apart for something, not just away from things, and you are allowed to know what for. It is written into the shape of that ceremony, ear and hand and foot. That restlessness you have carried about it for years came from His Spirit, and it has been pointing here the whole time.

Which brings me to the thing this category gets wrong more than any other.

Most people, asked what being set apart has meant for them, can produce a list of what they stopped. What they gave up. What they no longer do or watch or say. And every item might be right, and the list is still not holiness, because a list of subtractions describes an empty room and God has never once been interested in an empty room.

He said what He is after and He said it plainly.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes.Ezekiel 36:26

Cause you to walk. That is His verb, not yours. He puts in the heart, He puts in the Spirit, and He is the one who causes the walking, so the walk was never your achievement to produce and never your failure to explain. You have a new heart, and it is not a target, it is a transplant, and the same Spirit named in that promise is the one in you now.

The card in your hand has gone soft at the corner. You can put it down.