The Day It Landed On The Teacher

There are eleven books stacked at the end of the kitchen table and none of them are open, because it is Thursday and there is no class until next week.

Your sister is here. There is coffee. Somebody has said something ordinary.

And in the middle of it, without any warning, the thing you have taught for nine years arrived in your own chest.

Not as information. You have had the information since you were twenty four and you could set it out on a board in four minutes with the objections answered.

It arrived the other way. The way it arrives for the people in your class, which you have watched happen from the front of a room dozens of times and have never once experienced from the inside.

And you did not say anything to your sister, because how would you.

Let me say something before we go on.

I am not correcting you.

Nine years of handling something accurately is not nine years of missing it. Teaching a truth well is a real service and there are people standing on ground you laid, and I am not going to reframe the knowing as a failure.

I am saying I noticed what happened at the table. That is all. And I want to name it, because you have not named it and you may not.

Christ in you

Here is the phrase, and it is worth noticing where Paul puts the emphasis.

To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.Colossians 1:27

Christ in you.

Paul is not describing a doctrine that has been made available. He calls it a mystery that God would make known, which is a phrase about a revealing rather than about a curriculum.

And the content of the mystery is not a proposition. It is a location. Christ, and then a preposition, and then a person.

Which means the thing taught accurately in that room for nine years is not fundamentally a subject. It is an address.

So let me turn and say it straight to you, at that table with the coffee going cold.

You are the place named in the mystery. Not one day, not once you can teach it better, not when the gap between knowing and having has been closed by some other means. Right now, on a quiet Thursday with your sister across the table, you are what the preposition in that verse is pointing at. That is not my flattery. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written line down onto a real woman in a real kitchen.

Now, about what happened.

I want to name it plainly. That was the crossing.

It did not look like the version visible from the front of a room. There was no visible moment, nobody was praying, and it happened while somebody was talking about something else entirely.

That does not make it smaller. If anything it makes it more like most of them, because the ones you see from the front are the visible minority and the rest happen at kitchen tables on Thursdays and never get reported.

And here is the part that matters for a woman like you: you do not have to explain it, and you do not have to be able to account for the mechanism, and it does not need to be defensible in front of a class before it can be yours.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have a Christ in you rather than a doctrine about Him, and the location was true through all nine of the teaching years. The word says Christ in you, the hope of glory, which is an address rather than an argument, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real kitchen on a real quiet weekday.

It landed. Let it have landed. That is the whole of the work left.