It Was Never Money

The mugs are twelve for eight pounds and he has priced them himself, on a bit of card, in his own handwriting, and he has been standing behind them since seven.

They are the blue ones. They came from a place in Stoke and they were the single best decision he made in four years, because they were heavy and they kept the heat and people used to turn them round in their hands. There is the chalkboard leaning against the table leg. There is the little brass bell that went when the door opened. The machine went last month to a man in a van who paid less than it was worth and did not look him in the eye.

Eleven weeks since the shutter came down. And the strange thing, the thing nobody tells you, is that the crisis part is over. The frightening phone calls stopped. Nothing is on fire any more. What is left is a Sunday in a field with a folding table, and the smell of somebody else's bacon van, and a life that is simply not there any more.

A woman picks up two of the mugs and turns one round in her hand, exactly the way they used to, and while she is finding her purse she says, kindly, and she means it: God's going to give you back double, you know. He gives abundantly.

He says thanks. He puts the mugs in a bag. He watches her walk off down the row and he is not angry with her, he really is not, because she was being nothing but kind. He just stands there thinking: that word. Everybody keeps saying that word to me. And every single time I hear it, what I actually hear is money, and I have none of that either.

Maybe that is where you are. Somebody handed you a beautiful verse about ashes and you could not make it reach the ground you are standing on. And if you came to a page like this one hoping the word meant a check, I am not going to make you feel small about that, because nobody who has lost something hopes for the sophisticated thing first.

Let me say what the word is not

I want to do the plain thing straight away and get it out of the way, so nothing after this is being sold to you.

Abundance is not money. Not here, not on this page, not in the verse it comes from. It is not a rebuild, it is not the unit reopening, it is not double the tables and a queue out of the door. I am not going to hint at it, and I am not going to leave the word conveniently vague so it does a bit of quiet work on you while you read.

Here is the sentence the word actually lives in.

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

Read what the noun is. Life. That is the thing being given. Abundantly is not a separate parcel with things in it; it is a description of how much life. Fullness. More of it than there was. Over the brim, and not measured out with a small cup, and not in proportion to anything you managed.

So abundance in the Bible means fullness of life, and that is the whole definition, and it is the only one this site will ever hand you.

You have that, and I am not saying it because it is the encouraging thing to say. It is in the sentence, written down in John 10, spoken by the Shepherd Himself in the chapter about a Shepherd, and the Holy Spirit makes an eleven week old wound able to receive it, because a definition on its own would never get that far in.

And now back to the field

Nothing I have just said fills the unit or gives you back the four years.

I want to stay here a minute, because a page that hurries past this has not understood what eleven weeks is. Eleven weeks is when the casseroles have stopped. It is when everybody has moved on to the next thing while ten to five in the morning still arrives with your chest going. It is having to explain it to a man at a car boot sale who asks conversationally what you used to do.

And I am not going to tell you the ruin was for the best. I will not tell you it was sent, or allowed for a reason somebody could explain to you, or that in a few years you will be grateful for it. Those are the comfortable sentences and they are lies, and I will not put one in your hands while you are standing in a field.

What I will say is this. You are not outside anything. The fullness in that verse was never fitted to your circumstances in the first place; it was fitted to you, and Scripture puts it in the hands of a Shepherd who goes where the sheep actually is, and His Spirit does not wait for the ground to be tidy before He fills a person on it.

What fullness looks like on a Sunday in a field

So what does it actually mean, if it is not the unit and not the money.

It means being able to feel things again. It means the return of ordinary tenderness, the day you notice you laughed at something. It means being loved while producing nothing, which most of us have never once experienced and would not have chosen to learn this way. It means prayer that is not a negotiation. It means being able to be with people again, and to want to. It means sleeping. It means the small astonishing return of wanting anything at all.

None of that is a consolation prize handed over because the real thing is unavailable. Read the verse again. Life, and more of it, was always the headline. Everything you lost was scaffolding around a life, and the scaffolding came down, and the appalling and merciful truth is that the life is still there under it and God is filling it.

You have been given fullness in the exact place you are standing, and the word of God says life rather than possessions and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into you now, in a field, on a Sunday, over a folding table.