Nobody Came For The Frame

The brown paper parcel has been against the hall wall since March and it has a name on it in his own handwriting.

It is a box frame. Deep, so that the shirt could sit properly, with the sleeves pinned the way the woman wanted and the number facing out. He mounted it on a Wednesday and he was pleased with it, which is a thing he does not say often. She never came for it. She paid the deposit in January and something happened in that family, and nobody ever came, and by the time the shutter went down he could not have told you where to send it.

So it lives in the hall, against the radiator, and he moves it when the hoover needs to go past.

Seven months.

Tuesday is the worst one. Not Monday, because Monday still has the shape of a week in it and there are always forms. Tuesday is the day that used to be quiet in the shop, the day for the backlog, the day he would put the radio on and do four or five jobs and eat his sandwich standing at the bench at half twelve. Now Tuesday has nothing in it at all, and it arrives every week, and there is a particular hour around two in the afternoon that he has learned to be somewhere else for.

The molding went for almost nothing. That is the bit that still gets him, more than the lease and more than the letter. Lengths of good ash and oak that he chose himself off a rack in a warehouse, gone to a man from Leeds in a Transit, all of it, in twenty minutes.

The mount cutter is in the garage under a sheet.

The lads found other work, which is right, and he is glad, and he says so every time, and it is true. It also means that the thing which had his name on it and four people's Fridays in it is now a fact about the past.

Somebody at church said it to him, meaning it, and squeezing his arm: God restores what the locusts have eaten. He knows the verse. He has read Joel. And he stood there thinking the thing he has never said to anybody, which is: I do not think I am getting a shop back, and I do not think you are supposed to be telling me that I am.

Maybe that is where you are. Somebody keeps promising you a copy of what went, and you have gone quiet rather than argue with them, and underneath the quiet is the thing you would say if you thought you were allowed to: I do not believe that, and I am not certain I even want it.

What is not being promised here

Abundance is not money and it is not a copy of the shop. On this site the word means fullness of life, which is John 10 verse 10, where Jesus said He came so that people would have life and have it abundantly, and the noun in that sentence is life. Not premises. Not stock. Not the four Fridays. Life, and more of it. I am not going to leave that vague and let it do quiet work on you.

So here is what is actually true on a Tuesday. You have His attention in a hall with a brown paper parcel against the radiator, and nobody is asking you to be excited about anything. Isaiah 43 says God is doing a new thing and that it springs up, and it never once describes what the new thing looks like. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land as fact rather than as a phrase somebody puts on a card.

That reticence is deliberate and it is a mercy. A described future is a future a man can hold this actual Tuesday up against, and find it wanting, and grieve twice in the same afternoon. So the verse says a new thing and then stops talking, and the stopping is the kindness in it.

And you were never asked to want it yet. Wanting comes back on its own timetable or it does not, and Scripture never makes desire the entry fee. The psalms are full of people who had gone flat and said so to God in writing, and the Spirit keeps company with a man in that condition rather than standing about waiting for him to perk up.

Burnt ground is not a metaphor

Isaiah 61 has a line about oaks and it is a real line, and I am not going to inflate it. It says that those who mourn are given oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified. Read what it does and does not say. It says planted. It does not say when, or how big, or that anybody gets their old wood back.

So what is available today is smaller than a forecast and a good deal more solid. You are planted, which is a word about where a thing is rather than a word about what it turns into. Isaiah calls it the planting of the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person rooted in ground that has been through a fire.

Seven months is when people stop asking and a man starts noticing the shape of a Tuesday. It is also, and this is the awkward part, roughly when small things start becoming visible again, and most people walk straight past them, because they are looking for something the size of the thing that went.

You have things growing in your life already and they are almost certainly too small to count as news. Not a replacement. Not the beginning of a comeback, and I am not going to dress them up as one. Scripture calls the kingdom a seed, and then a mustard seed, and then leaven in a bowl, which is God being deliberately specific about scale, and His Spirit is the one who gives a man eyes for what is small.

It does not have to match

The hardest sentence in this category is that what grows is not a copy and is under no obligation to resemble what went. People hear that as a downgrade. It is not a downgrade and it is not a promotion either, because those are both comparisons, and the comparison is the thing that has been quietly exhausting you since March.

And you are free of the obligation to compare. That is not resignation and it is not making the best of things: it is that God has never once tied His giving to a like for like exchange, and Isaiah 43 says a new thing rather than the old one repaired. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man look at something small and living without immediately measuring it against a shop.

So the work today is not hope. Hope is a gift and it does not come on demand, and I am not going to ask you to manufacture one. The work today is noticing, which is a much lower bar, and which the fire did not take.