Clothed Before You Were Asked To Walk

Ines owns one coat and it has four bleach spots on the left sleeve, in a line, like somebody flicked a brush at her.

That was the laundry, which was her second job. Her first job was a fish counter, and the jeans from that year are in a sack in the garage because her mother will not let her throw them out and nobody will ever wear them again. She is seventeen. She has learned exactly one thing about working life, and she learned it twice: you show up in your own clothes and you find out what the work does to them.

So on the first Tuesday in March she goes to Marchetti's nursery in her worst everything. Bleach coat. The jeans with resin on the knee. Sneakers with the sole coming away from the toe of the left one, which she has decided is fine.

She is braced. She has the whole day mapped in her head. She is going to be handed a job she does not understand, she is going to do it wrong in front of people who already know how, and she is going to go home smelling of something.

Tobias, who runs the growing sheds, meets her at the gate and does not take her to the benches.

He takes her round the back, past the boiler, to a narrow room with hooks and a sink, and on one of the hooks there is a canvas apron, still stiff, that has never been on anybody. There are gloves. There is a pair of boots, and they are her size, which means somebody asked, which means somebody wrote it down.

He points at the sink first. Wash your hands and your arms to the elbow, he says, and he waits while she does it, and hands her the towel himself.

Then the apron over her head, and he ties it at the back for her because the first time is awkward, and then the boots, and she sits on the bench by the door and puts them on and they fit.

Last he takes down a flat tin, opens it, and works a smear of wax and oil into the wooden handle of the knife on the lanyard, and then he puts some of it on her palms and tells her to rub it in, because the handle is new and her hands are soft and by Thursday she would have had blisters.

Then he says the only sentence about the actual work she will hear all morning. You will learn the plants. Nobody learns the plants in a week. You will learn them dressed.

And Ines stands in a doorway in a stiff apron and boots that fit and oil in her hands, and something goes very quiet in her chest, because she has spent two years believing that the gear comes to you after you prove you are worth the gear.

She had the order backwards. Everybody had told her it that way round. Nobody had ever done it that way round.

Nobody asked Aaron to do anything yet

There is a chapter in Leviticus that reads like a getting dressed scene, because that is exactly what it is.

The whole assembly is gathered at the door of the tent. Aaron and his sons are brought forward. And the first thing that happens to them is water: Moses washes them. Not a symbolic dab. Washed.

Then, and only then, the clothes go on, in a specific order, one garment at a time.

And he put upon him the coat, and girded him with the girdle, and clothed him with the robe, and put the ephod upon him, and he girded him with the curious girdle of the ephod, and bound it unto him therewithLeviticus 8:7

Read that again and notice what is missing. There is no instruction in it. There is no standard, no probation, no list of what Aaron must now avoid. It is a man standing still while somebody else dresses him, and the somebody else is doing all the verbs.

You were dressed the same way and in the same order, and this is not my opinion about you, it is the sequence Scripture uses; the same Spirit who walked Moses through those buttons is the one who put the robe on you, and it was on you before anybody said the word obedience.

Then comes the oil, poured on the head, running down. Then the strangest part, and the part I love: blood on the tip of the right ear, on the thumb of the right hand, on the big toe of the right foot. What he hears. What he handles. Where he goes. The three places a life actually happens, marked before he had done anything at all with any of them.

And the garments had a stated purpose, which most people never hear. They were made for glory and for beauty. Not for concealment. Not so nobody could see how ordinary he was underneath. For glory and for beauty, on a man who had melted down earrings into a calf not very long before.

This is the part of holiness that got lost, and losing it has cost people years. Ask most believers what they are set apart from and they can give you a list. They have that list ready. Ask them what they are set apart for and watch the pause. The list of things given up is not the calling. The calling is a Person, and the whole point of the wardrobe is that you are dressed to stand near Him.

You are set apart for Him right now, in this chair, in whatever you happen to be wearing. Ezekiel 36:26 hands you a new heart and a new spirit as a gift and not as a target, and it is His Spirit doing that in you rather than the sound of me saying so.

Which brings up the sentence that undoes the whole treadmill. Read the next line in Ezekiel and see who is doing the walking. He puts His Spirit within them, and then He says He will cause them to walk in His ways. Cause. The walking is not the entrance fee for the clothes; the walking is what the clothes and the oil and the new heart were for, and the One who dressed you is the same One who moves your feet.

So the failure you are bracing for is not the disaster you think it is. Ines is going to overwater a whole tray of cuttings in her second week. It will not be a scandal. It will be a Tuesday, and Tobias will show her the difference between damp and wet with his thumb, and she will still be wearing the apron at the end of it, because the apron was never a reward for competence.

You have not been put on probation. Hebrews 10:14 says He has perfected forever those who are set apart, and the Holy Spirit is not standing behind you with a stopwatch waiting to see whether the promise holds.