Life, Not A License

The frame is face down in a box in the loft, under a bag of tinsel, and he has come up the ladder on a Saturday afternoon looking for the extension lead.

He does not mean to turn it over. He does it the way anybody does, with a thumb, and there it is. His name in a serif type, and the little seal that used to mean he could open up on his own on a Sunday if somebody in the village needed insulin before Monday. Twenty two years. He knew half the regulars by their prescriptions before he knew their faces, and he knew which old man came in on a Thursday mainly to talk to somebody.

Then a room with a table in it, and folders, and three people who were perfectly polite about all of it, and it took an afternoon and a half.

Seven months now. Here is what seven months is. It is when the phone has stopped altogether, not because anybody is cruel but because there is nothing left to ask him. His wife has gone back to full time, which she had to. The lanyard is in the drawer in the hall with the batteries and the spare fuses, and he has not thrown it out and could not tell you why.

There is a shed at the back where he has been sorting screws into jars. Actual jars, with labels on them. He is fifty three.

Last Sunday a good man put a hand on his shoulder in the church doorway and said, with real warmth: God has abundance for you, brother. He has more than enough. And he said thank you, because the man meant every word of it and it had cost him something to come over.

He got into the car afterwards and sat there a while before starting it. What he was thinking was this. Every time somebody says that word to me, what I hear is a salary. What I hear is a door, and a title, and the letters after my name given back. And I have none of that, so the word arrives sounding like a joke being told in another room by people who are not looking at me.

Maybe that is roughly where you are this afternoon. Somebody handed you a word that shines and you could not make it reach the floor you happen to be standing on. And if you came to a name like this one half hoping the word meant a check, I am not going to make you small about that, because nobody who has lost their work reaches for the subtle thing first.

Let me take the ambiguity out of it first

I want to do the plain thing straight away, so that nothing after it is being quietly sold to anybody.

Abundance is not money. It is not a salary, it is not the letters after a name, it is not a hearing reopened and twenty two years handed back across the same table. I am not going to hint at it and I am not going to leave the word softly vague so it can do a bit of work on a man sitting in a car park.

Here is the sentence the word actually comes out of.

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

Look at what the noun is. Life. That is the thing being given. Abundantly is not a second parcel with items in it, it is a description of how much life. Over the brim. Fullness of life, poured into a person rather than measured out against whatever that person managed to hold on to.

So the word means fullness of life, and that is the whole of the definition, and it is the only one this page will ever hand anybody.

You have that already, and I am not saying it because it is the warm thing to say to a man on a loft ladder. It is in the sentence, written down in John 10 and spoken by the Shepherd Himself in the chapter about a shepherd, and the Holy Spirit takes a written line and puts it inside somebody with nothing left to show for twenty two years of Thursdays.

Two comfortable sentences wait at the foot of that ladder

Something has to be said carefully here, because there are two sentences waiting on either side of a loss like this one and both of them do damage.

The first says the work never really mattered anyway. It did. Scripture never sneers at work; God Himself is at it in the first chapter of Genesis and calls the result good, and a man who counted out tablets for twenty two years and knew which customer came in mostly for the company was doing something holy in a completely unremarkable way. Nobody gets to call that small.

The second is worse, because it wears a spiritual coat. It says somebody upstairs arranged the afternoon in order to teach him something, that in a few years he will be glad of it, that this is simply how God opens doors. I am not putting a sentence like that in your hands. People reach for those words because standing in silence beside a hurting man is very hard, and they are not true, and nobody has to hold one in order to be a good Christian.

You were loved on the afternoon of that hearing. Not afterwards, once the shock had been processed into something more presentable. During it, in the room, with the folders open and the polite voices going and the clock up on the wall. That is not a kind way of retelling the day, it is what the word of God says about a love that runs from everlasting to everlasting in Psalm 103, and it is His Spirit who carries it back down seven months of hallway to the man who was sitting at that table.

What fullness looks like in a shed with jars in it

So what does the word actually mean in a life like this one, if it does not mean the register and it does not mean the salary.

It means being able to feel things again. It means ordinary tenderness coming back, the afternoon somebody notices they laughed out loud at the radio. It means being loved while producing nothing at all, which most of us have never once experienced and would never have chosen to learn this way. It means prayer that has stopped being a negotiation. It means sleeping. It means wanting to see people, and then actually going and seeing them.

None of that is a consolation prize handed over because the real thing turned out to be unavailable. Read the verse again. Life, and more of it, was always the headline. The register and the title and the shop were scaffolding built around a life, and the scaffolding came down in an afternoon and a half, and the merciful and appalling truth is that the life is still standing underneath it.

You have been given fullness in the exact place where that ladder is, and it is the word of God which says life rather than possessions, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a man in a loft with a picture frame in both hands and dust on his sleeve.

And it is not a payment for how well anybody has coped. Nothing in John 10 puts a threshold in front of a sheep. The Shepherd goes where the sheep actually is, over rough ground, and He does not send word ahead asking for the field to be tidied first.

You are inside that sentence right now, seven months in, with the lanyard still in the drawer beside the fuses and nothing at all decided about the rest of it. That is not my encouragement and it is not a technique. It is what Scripture already said about the Shepherd, and His Spirit is the one who makes a seven month old wound able to receive something new.