Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.
Galatians 5:24-25 (NIV)
A Death Already Behind Them
Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Paul puts that in the past tense and leaves it there. The acts of the flesh are obvious, he had said, and he had named them: hatred, fits of rage, jealousy, selfish ambition, envy, the whole plain list.
Her closet door hasn’t shut all the way since her second year in the house. It’s a little after eight, she has the day cleared and two rolls of contractor bags, and she’s on the floor with the first shoebox open in her lap. She wires houses for a living. A panel has never once stumped her. She’s been forty minutes on a box of birthday cards.
The bag has a sweater in it and a lamp cord. The slow ones are small: a bulletin from a baptism, a charger for a phone she doesn’t own, a key she can’t place, a receipt from a restaurant that closed. She turns each one over, decides it can wait, and puts it back in the box.
I find it lovely that they’re named by who they belong to. Wake up wanting exactly the thing you’ve spent a decade trying not to want, and the sentence reads like a lie about you. Paul writes it in the past anyway. He tells that church whose they are, and only then how they’re to walk, and the death of the flesh comes attached to the belonging, on a morning when nothing in you agrees.
That order does real work for a woman on the floor with the bags. She clears because she’s his. It can take her the rest of her life, and none of it decides whether he has her. People who try it the other way spend years emptying in order to find out, and the box goes back on the shelf every time, because a shoebox has never yet settled a question about who somebody belongs to.
Her brother-in-law comes up the stairs at ten with an armload of flattened boxes and stands in the doorway holding them. “These I’m keeping,” she says about the cards, and she doesn’t look up.
A Prayer to Remember
I keep a few things alive that died when I became yours. I’ve called them my personality and my history and a couple of other names, Lord. I’m done arguing about it. Reach the part of me that’s still negotiating, because I can hear it going.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
