The Folding Stool at the Corner

The message on the group said everyone welcome, the more the merrier, just bring yourself, and so she brought herself, and a bag of satsumas, because you cannot arrive with nothing.

The house is loud in the way a house is when two tables have been pushed together and the chairs have been fetched from every room. Dining chairs, kitchen chairs, the piano stool, a garden chair with a cushion on it. She is on the folding stool at the corner, the one that came out of the cupboard under the stairs when the count came up short, and she has been told three times not to worry, there is plenty, sit anywhere. She is between somebody's teenage son, who is polite and starving, and the end of the table where the dishes get put down. Steam off the potatoes. A dog under the table hoping. The host's wife shouting through from the kitchen that the gravy is coming and nobody is to start.

Everyone is kind. That is the thing about it. Nobody in this room would say a hard word to her, and everybody in it would say she was welcome, because she is, generally. She was on the message with thirty other people. She could have not come and there would have been one less stool, and the count would have come out, and the day would have gone exactly the same. She knows this without bitterness, the way you know the weather.

The host stands and everybody goes quiet, and he says grace, short and warm, the way he does. "Lord, thank You for this food, and thank You for everyone who came." And she thinks, in the half second before the amen: everyone. He is willing in general. And she has read the verse where Jesus says how often He wanted to gather the children of the city under His wings, and she has read it the same way she heard that grace: Jerusalem, all of them, a city, a group message, everyone welcome.

And you know that stool. You have never doubted that God is willing. You have read the verses and believed them, and every one of them arrived in your hands addressed to everyone, and you have been part of everyone your whole life. What you have never once been sure of is that He wanted you. In particular. By name. Enough to notice if the count came out one short.

A hen does not gather poultry in general

This is a safe room, and I want to go carefully, because there is grief in the verse in front of you and I am not going to sand it off to make it warmer. Here it is, whole.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!"Matthew 23:37

Jesus is weeping over a city that would not have Him, and the picture He reaches for, and the Holy Spirit kept for us, is a mother bird. Let me say the doctrine plainly first, because it keeps the comfort honest: God is neither male nor female. Scripture says He is not a man (Numbers 23:19), and Scripture also describes Him with a father's traits and a mother's, and Jesus, who is God with us, chose a hen's wings to tell a city what His wanting felt like. The picture is His, and He chose it, and it does not make Him a mother any more than calling Him a rock makes Him stone. It is a simile that God picked for Himself, and we keep it in exactly the shape He gave it. He is our Father, and He said He wanted to gather like a hen, and both are true of the one God at once, and neither one is lowered to lift the other.

Now look at what a hen actually does, because that is why the picture works. She does not gather poultry in general. She does not stand in the yard and announce that any chick who happens to be passing is welcome under here. She knows her brood, and she goes and gets them, one at a time, by whatever it is a hen calls a name, and she gathers them under her body with a fierceness that has nothing general about it. That is the picture Jesus reached for. Not everyone welcome. Your children, gathered.

And the grief proves it. You do not weep over a general willingness that was declined. Nobody cries at a group message. Jesus wept because the wanting was particular and it was refused, and it is written that He said your children, not the population, and the Holy Spirit kept that sentence in the Book with the tears still in it. That is the first thing I want to hand you. The wanting in that verse is not a policy. It has names in it. It always had.

Why have I found favor, that you should notice me

There is a woman in the Hebrew Scriptures who asked your exact question out loud, in a field, with her face on the ground. Ruth is a foreigner, a widow, gleaning at the edge of a stranger's harvest because that is what the law lets the poor do, and the owner of the field walks over and speaks to her, by name, and tells his men to leave extra for her. And she says: why have I found favor in your eyes, that you should take notice of me, since I am a foreigner? (Ruth 2:10). Take notice of me. Not of gleaners. Of me.

And Boaz answers her with wings. He says the LORD repay you, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge (Ruth 2:12). Read those two verses together and hear what happened. A woman who expected to be one of the poor in general was noticed in particular, and the man who noticed her told her that what she had come under was not his kindness but God's wings. The whole scroll is about her. God noticed a gleaner at the edge of a field so specifically that He gave her a book with her name on it, and put her in the line of the Messiah, and the wanting was His before it was hers.

You are noticed like that. I am not softening a general verse for you; I am reading you a specific one. Scripture says God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), which is before there was an everyone to be part of, and His Spirit is the one who takes a line about a foreigner in a barley field and says your name in it. You did not come under a policy. You came under wings.

The corner of the cloak

Later in that scroll, Ruth goes to Boaz at night on the threshing floor and asks him for exactly what he had blessed her with. Spread the corner of your garment over me, she says, and the word for the corner of a cloak is the same word for the wing of a bird. She had heard him say under whose wings and she came back and asked for the wing. That is what Psalm 91 means when it says He covers you with His pinions and under His wings you find refuge (Psalm 91:4). Not a shelter with a general door. A wing spread over a person who asked.

Here is the part I most want you to receive, because it is where the stool at the corner turns. You have been reading everyone welcome and hearing yourself excluded by being included, and the God who wrote the Book knew you would, and He put Ruth in it. He put a woman face down in a field saying why me. He put a hen in the mouth of Jesus. He put your name on His hands (Isaiah 49:16). You were wanted before you were counted, and the written word says so in more than one place, and the Holy Spirit is not reading you a group message. He is saying it to the stool.

And I will not turn this into a lever. I am not going to tell you that because He wanted you, you must now do something to prove you were worth wanting. The city in the verse was not willing, and He wept, and He did not stop being the one who wanted. The wanting does not depend on you. It is His, and it is particular, and it is not going anywhere.