My Grandfather Shoulders

The jacket is not the right size and everyone in the house has already decided not to mention it.

Back bedroom, morning light coming through a curtain that has been in this house longer than he has been alive, the sound of the kitchen going downstairs, somebody laughing and then remembering and stopping. Cars arriving. A cousin shouting up about whether anyone has seen the keys.

He is standing in front of a wardrobe mirror with the door not quite square, in his grandfather's suit jacket, and it is at least two sizes too big across the shoulders. The seams sit somewhere down his upper arms. The sleeves go past the knuckle. He looks like a boy, which he stopped being about eleven years ago and stops being again this morning, and he knows exactly how he looks and he is going to wear it anyway.

His aunt comes in without knocking, because she has never knocked in her life.

She does not say anything about the fit. She comes over and she smooths the lapel flat with the palm of her hand, twice, the way she has smoothed a thousand things flat, and she puts one hand on the shoulder seam where it is sitting wrong and she presses it down as though that will help, and it does not help, and she does it anyway.

Then she says nothing at all and goes back downstairs.

He stands there. He puts his own hand where hers was. And the sentence arrives that has been waiting for him since he was about sixteen and has never once found a good moment before this one:

I am not big enough for this.

Not the jacket. The whole thing. The name, the position he has just inherited by nobody's decision, the responsibility that walked across the room this week and stopped in front of him because there is nobody else standing there.

That is you. Your version might not have a funeral in it, but you know the mirror and you know the sentence.

Something got handed to you. A family, a role, a name, a thing everybody now looks at you about. And you have been wearing it with the seams sitting wrong for years, and privately you have been waiting for somebody to notice and take it back.

Two plain things first. If your version of this includes somebody frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to stand and take it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this thing is, it is not a person. Not the ones who left it to you, not the ones who never helped, not the one downstairs. Scripture is flat that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

Paul says put on, and then he says what goes on

There is a line in Colossians about getting dressed, and the whole answer to a man in a mirror is sitting in the middle of it.

Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering.Colossians 3:12

Read the order, because the order is the mercy.

Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved. Everything he asks a person to wear comes after that clause, and that clause is not something anybody achieved this morning in front of a wardrobe. Chosen. Set apart. Loved. Those three are stated as the ground under the feet before a single garment is named, never as the reward for wearing them well.

So the question in the mirror is answered before it is asked. He is not saying grow into this and then you may wear it. He is saying you are already the person this belongs to, so put it on.

You are already named as the one this was handed to, and the naming came before the fit. That is not a kind thing to say to a young man in a bedroom: Colossians 3:12 puts holy and beloved in front of the whole wardrobe, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a chosen thing rest on a real person on the worst morning of a year rather than the amount of size anybody can manage in front of a mirror.

The seams sitting wrong are not a verdict

Here is what a jacket that is too big has taught you wrongly, and it is time it came into the light.

The fit has been read as a judgment. Shoulders too wide, therefore wrong man. That is an honest reading and it is upside down, because a jacket is cut for a body that is not here anymore and a calling is cut for the work and not for the wearer.

The armor in Ephesians works the same way, and it is worth naming beside this. It is called the whole armour of God, and of God is the part that carries the weight of the sentence. It is His. It is sized to what it has to stop. Nobody in that passage is asked to fill it out first, and there is no smaller set kept in the back for people who feel like boys in it.

You have been wearing something cut for the work and reading it as a coat you failed to fill. The written word never once measures a person against the covering it hands them, and His Spirit is the one holding it on somebody who has spent years waiting to be found out.

And there is no technique here. Nothing on this page is a procedure you could get right or wrong, because the second a thing can be performed badly the whole weight of the outcome slides back onto the one performing it, and it has been sitting on your shoulders since you were sixteen and it does not belong there.

You are standing in something that was put on you, right now, in front of a mirror with the door not quite square. Colossians 3:12 says put on, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, and the Spirit of God is what makes a handed thing sit on a real body on a real morning.