A Card Still In The Drawer

The card is in the drawer with the batteries and the takeaway menus.

It is a good one, a proper one from the shop by the library, with a rabbit on it in a waistcoat, because he is four now and the last picture she saw he was holding a toy rabbit. She wrote it in September. She wrote it three times, in fact, and the first two went in the bin, because the first one said far too much and the second one said nothing at all and read like a card from a dentist.

She has not sent it. She does not have the address.

Ten weeks since the last message, and that one was four lines and it was about a parcel. Before that, eleven weeks. She has counted, obviously. Everybody counts.

The strange part is how ordinary it has become. There was a period of phone calls and letters and one dreadful afternoon in a car park. That finished. Nothing is happening at all now, which is worse, and which nobody warns you about. Her sister asked about it at first and now does not, out of kindness, and she cannot decide which she would prefer.

On Sunday she stood in the third row and the song was one of the big ones, the one where the room lifts, and she got as far as the second line of the chorus and her mouth simply stopped. Not tears. She could have managed tears. It would not come, because it was not true, and she has never been able to sing something at God that is not true.

So she stood there with her hands at her sides while a hundred and forty people sang the roof off, and she thought: I have got nothing to bring in here. I cannot do this bit.

Afterwards a man on the door said, isn't He good, and she said yes, and she meant it, and she also thought about the drawer the whole way home.

Maybe that is where you are. Not angry with God, and not doubting a single thing, just standing in a room full of people singing about a goodness you cannot get your mouth around this week.

The word, plainly, before anything else

The word on the front of this site first, because it is doing work in the background and I would rather have it out in the open.

Abundance is not money, and it is not a full table at Christmas either. It is fullness of life. That is what the word means, and there is no quiet second meaning underneath it involving anything arriving.

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.John 10:10

The noun is life. Abundantly is how much. And here is the part that matters for a woman standing in the third row: a person can be full while a table is not. Those are two different measurements, and this page only ever deals in the first one.

You have that fullness now, at ten weeks, with the card still in the drawer and nothing at all resolved. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own words, and the Holy Spirit carries it into a person who could not get through a chorus on Sunday.

Praise is a garment, and a garment is given

Isaiah says a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, and that line has been used for years as an instruction, as though praise were a mood you owe. Read what it actually is. A garment is put on you by somebody else. It is given, the way a coat is put round somebody's shoulders at the side of a road.

That single word changes the whole thing. If praise is given, then heaviness is not the disqualification. Heaviness is the thing the garment goes over.

You are not being asked to feel anything before you open your mouth, and you were never asked. Isaiah 61 hands the garment to people in mourning rather than to people who have recovered from it, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the putting on, which is why a heavy person can still worship honestly.

And it works the other way as well. Nothing about worship requires anybody to say the loss is fine. A woman singing that God is good is not making a statement about her family. She is making a statement about God, and those are two separate sentences, and confusing them has silenced more honest people than doubt ever has.

True and short is still praise

Here is where the pretending usually creeps in. A person decides that if they cannot manage the big sentence they had better say nothing, and so the mouth closes for months. But the big sentence was never the requirement.

Look at what the psalm actually asks for.

Trust in Him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before Him; God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out your heart. Not a curated version of it. Not the presentable part. And the psalms themselves are full of people doing exactly that in front of God with nothing tidy in their hands, which is why the book has outlasted three thousand years of people in trouble.

You have permission to worship in four words if four words is all that is true. Psalm 62 asks for a heart poured out rather than a heart dressed up, and the Holy Spirit takes what is honest and never audits it for volume.

So what is true, this week. Perhaps only this: Lord, You know where he is and I do not. Perhaps: God, You did not leave. Perhaps: I am still here and I am still Yours. Those are complete acts of worship. They are shorter than the songs and they cost a great deal more.

You were not disqualified by the ten weeks, and nothing about the silence in your family changed your standing in that room. Psalm 62 puts trusting and pouring out in the same breath rather than making one the price of the other, and His Spirit is the one who brings a person in who has nothing at all to announce.

What you can actually bring

There is an old habit in church rooms of measuring worship by how much of it there is, and it is worth naming, because it is the thing that keeps quiet people quiet. Volume is not the offering. Truth is the offering.

You are received as you actually are this Sunday, and not as the version of yourself who could get through the chorus. That is exactly what Psalm 62 means by pouring out the heart before Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a four word offering all the way in.