Your Name Was In It First

The floor by the back door had been soft for two years before Nadine let anybody look at it.

Merle Sizemore lifted the first board on a Tuesday morning in October, and what came up out of the gap was cold dirt and old newspaper. Nadine knelt on the linoleum holding a flashlight, the way you do when a man is working on your house and you can neither help him nor walk away from him.

"Joist is sound," he said, and knocked on it twice with a knuckle. "Whoever cut this was in no hurry at all."

He moved along two feet, pried up another board, and then sat back on his heels and said nothing for a moment.

"Come look at this," he said.

So she got down flat on her stomach on her own kitchen floor at forty-four years of age and put the light where he was pointing.

Cut into the face of the oak, letters an inch high, chiseled square and even, the way a man cuts when he intends the thing to outlast him:

RAISED 1948. FOR THEM THAT ARE HERE AND THEM THAT ARE NOT HERE YET.

Underneath it, a column of names going down the beam like a list on a barn door. Ollie. Vester. Ruth. Wanda. Carl. The cuts got shallower toward the bottom, the way an old man's hands get tired.

Second from the end: NADINE.

She knew the hand. Her grandfather raised that house the same year the well was dug, and he was dead before she was three, and he had cut her name into a floor beam in the summer before she was born, because her mother said it out loud at the supper table in June and he had gone under the house that same week with a gouge and a mallet.

Here is what you need to know about Nadine to understand why she stayed down there after Merle went out to the truck for his bar.

Ruth left when Nadine was six. Not dramatically. She went to Ohio for the work, and the work kept going and so did she. Wanda raised Nadine in the next county over, and Nadine came back to the home place for the reunion and for Decoration and for two weeks every July, and in every one of those years she was Ruthie's girl. Nobody said it unkindly. That was simply the shelf she was set on. In every photograph from that porch she is at the edge of the frame, and by twelve she was choosing the edge herself, because it is easier to stand somewhere on purpose than to be put there.

She had learned the arithmetic young: people keep you as long as you are worth the keeping. Everyone who ever told her she was theirs had let go of her eventually, and not one of them slammed a door doing it. They simply stopped coming.

So she had walked over her own name a thousand times. Barefoot in July, carrying a bowl of beans out to the porch. It had been down there under the floor the entire time she was standing at the edge of the picture.

She lay there with the flashlight until her arm went numb.

What was cut before the walls went up

Nadine did not earn that name into the oak. She could not have. She had no hands yet.

That is not a sentimental detail. It is the legal shape of the thing, and it is the shape of the agreement you are actually standing inside, whatever you have been told about your standing in it. His word rests that standing on an oath He swore and not on a record you keep, and His Spirit does not let that sentence stay theoretical for long.

In Scripture a covenant is not signed. It is cut. Genesis 15 has Abram asking God how he is supposed to know any of this is real, and God does not answer him with an argument. He tells him to bring the animals. Abram divides them and lays the pieces out in two rows and then spends the whole afternoon driving the birds off them, and at sundown a heavy sleep falls on him and the light goes. Then a smoking furnace and a burning lamp pass down between the pieces.

Two men making that kind of agreement would walk that path together. Both of them between the pieces, both saying with their feet what neither would care to say with his mouth: let it be done to me the way it was done to these, if I am the one who breaks this.

God walked it alone. The other party was asleep in the field.

You are inside an oath that was sworn over a sleeping man, and you are inside it on exactly those terms. That is not my reading of it, that is what Genesis 15:17 puts on the page, and His Spirit has carried that night in the field all the way down to the chair you are sitting in.

Paul goes back further than Abram. He goes back past the world.

According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,Ephesians 1:4-5

Read the order of that sentence slowly, because the order is the argument. Chosen first. Holy and without blame second. Not: get clean and then get chosen. Chosen, and then the being holy follows the way a walk follows a house you already live in.

You were picked before there was a floor to walk on, and before there was a world to have a floor in. His word says chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, and His Spirit is not reciting that at you like something to memorize, He is seating it under your feet.

If you have spent thirty years reading that sentence backward, there is no shame in this room over it. Backward is how most of us were handed it. Somebody added a step at the front, probably meaning well by it, and after that the whole gospel reads like a door with a fee on it.

Here is the thing about a name cut into a beam. Nadine could sand the floor. She could sell the house, move to Ohio, refuse to come to Decoration for eleven years. None of it reaches the beam, because the beam is under the floor and she was never the one holding the chisel.

The fear of being put back out has no right to stay in your house, and I am not saying that to encourage you. Romans 8:15 says you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, you received the Spirit of adoption, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who teaches a person to say Father out loud without flinching.

Merle put the floor back that afternoon and screwed it down, and it looks like every other floor in that house. The name is still under it. She does not have to be looking at it for it to be cut.