The Dress Kept In The Bag

The dress was navy blue, with a covered button at the throat and a hem that came down past the knee, and it had been in a zippered plastic bag at the back of Ilene's closet for twenty six years.

She had bought it for her nephew's wedding. She had worn it that one Saturday, had it cleaned on the Monday, and hung it up in the bag it came home in with a cardboard tag still stapled to the shoulder seam.

After that it was for good.

Everybody understands that phrase and nobody can define it. For good meant for later. For something that would come along and be important enough. Twenty six years is a lot of later.

Ilene was sixty eight and she could give you her list without stopping to think. She had quit the card club. She had quit going to the ball games on Sundays. She had quit a certain way of talking about people that she was not proud of, and she had let go of a friendship that had been bad for her in ways she could still describe precisely. It was an honest list. Not one item on it was a lie.

What she could not do, at all, in any language, was say what it was for.

She said it out loud once, at the sink, to nobody. "I have been set apart from a good many things," she said, "and I could not tell you one single thing I was set apart for."

Then in February, Kayla from up the road knocked on her door.

Kayla was twenty three and had a hearing at the county courthouse on Thursday morning and did not want to walk in there by herself. She asked Ilene, because Ilene was the one who brought soup, and that is the whole of the reasoning that twenty three year olds use, and it is better reasoning than most.

Ilene said yes before she had thought about clothes.

At six o'clock Thursday morning she stood in front of that closet in her housecoat. There was nothing in there that was right. Everything was either for the garden or for the grocery or for a funeral.

And then, at the back, the bag.

She got it out. The plastic had gone stiff and yellow across the shoulders and it crackled like a fire when she unzipped it. The cardboard tag was still stapled on. She did not even have scissors in the bedroom, so she carried the whole thing out to the truck and cut the tag off in the courthouse parking lot with the little scissors on Kayla's keyring, because she had not thought of it at home.

The dress was two decades out of style and it fit her fine.

They sat on a bench in a hallway with tall windows for an hour and ten minutes. Ilene held that girl's hand through the whole of it and got them both a cup of coffee out of the machine, and spilled some of it, because the machine had a lip on it that threw the cup.

She got home a little after eight that night. She hung the dress on the back of the door with a coffee stain on the right cuff and salt from the parking lot up the hem, and it smelled like a courthouse hallway, which is a smell like radiators and floor wax.

She hung it in the closet that way.

Without the bag.

Washed, and then clothed, and then sent

There is a chapter in Leviticus that almost nobody reads and it is the chapter that would have answered Ilene at the sink.

Leviticus 8 is the day Aaron and his sons were set apart. Watch the order, because the order is the whole answer.

First they are washed with water. That is step one. It is not the finish, it is the doorway, and this is where a great many good people stop for thirty years.

Then they are clothed. A coat, a sash, a robe, the ephod, the breastplate. Somebody else's hands put those garments on them. Nowhere in that chapter does a man dress himself.

Then oil is poured on them.

And then blood is put on the tip of the right ear, and on the thumb of the right hand, and on the great toe of the right foot.

Not a list of what they must stop doing. A hearing, a handling, and a going, all three marked out and claimed for a purpose. The older phrase sitting underneath our word consecrate has to do with a person's hands being filled, and a filled hand is a hand with work in it.

You were washed to be clothed and clothed to be sent, and not one link of that chain was your own manufacture. Leviticus 8 has Moses doing every verb in the chapter, and it is the Holy Spirit, not my ordering of it, who takes an ordination in a tent and lays it over a woman in a housecoat at six in the morning.

Now here is the garment itself, and it is not navy blue.

I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.Isaiah 61:10

He hath clothed me. He hath covered me. Both verbs are His and both are already finished, and the person doing the rejoicing in that verse is not rejoicing over an achievement, they are rejoicing over what got put on them.

You are already dressed, and you have been dressed the entire time you were standing in front of the closet saying there was nothing in there. Isaiah 61:10 says the clothing was His doing, and it is not my wording that turns that from a lovely sentence into the coat on your back this morning. It is His Spirit.

And this is where the from-list gets its right size. Ilene's list was not wrong. Quitting the card club was not wrong, and neither were any of the others, and I am not here to take a single item off it. But a from-list is the smaller half of the thing, and if it is the only half a person has, holiness quietly turns into a set of subtractions and then into a kind of tiredness nobody can name.

Set apart from is real. Set apart for is the sentence it belongs in.

Then the promise that keeps this from landing back on you as one more effort:

Ezekiel says a new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes. Read that last verb again. Cause you to walk. It is not, help you if you try harder. The walking is His causing.

You have a new heart, and the walking that comes out of it is not something you have to generate. Ezekiel 36:27 puts the causing on God's side of the sentence, and the same Spirit named in that verse is the one in the room with you, doing exactly what it says He does.

Ilene did not become useful in that hallway. She had been set apart for twenty six years. What happened on that Thursday is that the bag came off.