The Stamp In Your Passport

Emil has lived here fourteen years and he still converts everything.

Not on paper. In his head, instantly, before he can stop himself. Four twenty for a coffee becomes the old number, and the old number is always faintly obscene, and he pays and says thank you twice and walks out doing arithmetic nobody asked him to do.

His daughter is nineteen and sounds like she was born on this street, because she was. His son cannot roll an R to save his life and thinks the old country is a place you go in August for a wedding. Emil's certificate came through six years ago. It is in the second drawer of the desk in the hall, in the envelope it arrived in, under the warranty for a washing machine he no longer owns. He never framed it. He could not tell you why.

Here is his morning. He gets in the van at six and he practices his vowels at the lights, quietly, the two that give him away. He has been doing this for so long that his wife does it too now, out of solidarity, and they laugh about it, and neither of them has ever suggested stopping.

Here is October. Every year, somewhere in the second week, Emil's stomach goes tight and stays tight for about ten days, and it took him eleven years to work out why. October was when the renewals used to fall due. The forms, the photographs, the money order, the appointment, the long room with the numbered ticket, the walk back to the car with his shoulders down or his shoulders up depending. There are no renewals now. There have not been for six years. His body renews anyway.

And here is the thing he does not say to anybody. When an envelope comes with a plastic window in it, he opens it standing up by the door, with his coat still on, the way you open a thing that might revoke you.

Fourteen years. Two children with local accents. A certificate in a drawer under a warranty. And a man who still, in some deep and tired place, believes he is here on sufferance and could be sent back if he lets his vowels slip.

He would tell you that his faith is the same shape. He has been washing at the same thing for a long time. He confesses it, he means it, he gets a week or nine days out of it, and then the tightness comes back, and he goes and washes again. He is diligent about it. He is exhausted by it.

He has never once been told that somebody already moved him.

The washings ran out on purpose

Water shows up on the third page of the book, and the first thing God does with it is gather it.

He gathers the waters together into one place, and He calls the gathering Seas, and that is the oldest picture of water anybody has: not a jug you carry to a basin, a body of water big enough to go into. Hold that, because everything else stacks on it.

Then come the washings, and there are a great many of them. A chapter of Leviticus on what to wash and when. A chapter of Numbers on the water for a person who has touched death. Wash, and be clean, and the text keeps adding the same small devastating phrase: until the evening. Clean until evening. Then the sun goes down and tomorrow is its own problem.

That was not a design fault. It was a design. A washing is repeatable because a washing is meant to be repeatable, and the repetition was teaching a nation, over centuries, that this particular arrangement could keep them presentable and could never move them. Nobody in history has ever come out of a washing with a change of address.

You have been washing at something that was never able to relocate you. Colossians 1:13 is not a hygiene verse, it is a moving day, and the same Spirit who put that sentence into a letter to a small church in Asia is putting it into you now: the transfer has already been made and it did not wait for the evening.

Then the direction of the water reverses, and that is the hinge of the whole thing.

Listen to how it is said in Ezekiel. God is speaking to a people scattered out of their own land, and He does not tell them to go and wash. He says He is the one doing the sprinkling: then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean. The verb moves off the person and onto God. The next two lines give the new heart and the new spirit and the promise that His Spirit Himself will cause the walk. Clean water and a new heart arrive in the same paragraph, from the same hand, in the same direction: down, onto a person who is not doing the pouring.

And that is what a man in a camel hair coat was doing in a river, centuries later. Not a basin in a courtyard. A river, moving, big enough to go under, out past the edge of town, and people came up out of that water and went home belonging to something they had not belonged to that morning. When the Spirit fell in Jerusalem and three thousand people asked what they should do, the answer put the same water in front of them, and the promise attached to it was not a cleaner week. It was the gift of the Holy Spirit and a place among a people.

Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear SonColossians 1:13

Translated. Sit with that word for a second, because it is not devotional language, it is administrative language. It is what you do to a population: you move them, bodily and legally, out of one jurisdiction and into another, and the old jurisdiction loses its claim on the day the transfer is filed. Delivered out of. Translated into. Both verbs are past. Both verbs are His.

So the old country has no legal standing over you, and you are not here on a visa. What is written is written in the past tense on purpose, and His Spirit is the seal on that page rather than my confidence about it. You were carried over, and the file is closed.

If you have never gone through that water, I am not going to hand you a method, a place or a night. This message stops there on purpose. Find people who love Jesus, tell them, and let them carry it with you. You do not arrange a crossing alone and you were never meant to.

And if you did go through it, years ago, in a church you have half forgotten, with a pastor whose name will not come to you: it counted. It was not a nice moment that has since worn off. You are on the other bank at this moment, standing in a country whose language you already speak better than you think, because Colossians 1:13 says the King moved you Himself and the Spirit of God has never once filed you back.