Somebody Lit It Off Their Own

The field has that November smell, wet grass and smoke and somebody's van doing onions, and about four hundred people are standing in it with their chins up.

She came because her sister asked, and because saying no had started to require a reason she did not want to give. Her hands are round a paper cup of soup she is not drinking. Her boots have gone through at the toe and she has known that for a fortnight.

The first shell goes up and the whole field makes the noise, that low collective ohh that four hundred strangers produce without arranging it. Her face is lit up green and then gold, exactly like everybody else's, because that is what the light does to faces and it does not consult anybody.

And inside there is nothing at all.

Not sadness. She could manage sadness. This is flatter than that. The lights go up and something in her registers, distantly, that this is beautiful, in the way you might read on a sign that a room is warm while standing outside it. Six weeks ago everything came apart, and for six weeks she has been waiting for something to come back, and it has not, and somewhere in the last fortnight she stopped expecting it to.

That is the sentence, and if you are reading this you have probably said it to yourself in a room with the door shut. I do not think I am going to feel anything good again.

And you have tried. That is the part nobody sees. You have tried to work it up: the walk, the good coffee, the playlist, the deciding to be grateful. All of it running on a tank you know perfectly well is dry, and every attempt leaving you slightly further down than before you started.

What this word actually means, before anything else

The name over this site is abundance, and I want to be plain about it here at the start rather than let you carry a wrong hope through nine hundred words.

It does not mean money. Nothing here is a hint about your circumstances improving, and if anybody has ever handed you this word with a nudge about what God is about to do with your bank account, that was a different thing wearing the same word.

Jesus said He came so that they may have life and have it abundantly. Life. Fullness of the thing itself. Not more possessions around a life, but more life inside the life you have, which is a completely different substance from anything that could be counted.

You are in the hands of a God who deals in life rather than in compensation, and He is not offering you a replacement for what went. I am not softening the loss to make the sentence work. Scripture says the thief comes to steal and destroy and that Christ came for the opposite of that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes fullness something a person experiences rather than a word they have read. What is gone is gone, and nothing being said here pretends otherwise.

Name the pit before anybody mentions oil

Six weeks in is the worst of it and almost nobody knows that.

The first fortnight has a strange energy to it. People come. There are things to do, calls to make, a kind of terrible momentum. And then it stops, and everybody quite properly returns to their own lives, and what is left is an ordinary Tuesday with the whole thing still true and no crisis to carry anybody through it.

That is where you are standing, and I am not going to hurry you out of it. The ashes are real. What you are looking at is real. Whatever part you had in it, and there may have been one, is not being audited here and it is not being tidied away either.

You are met exactly here, in the ashes, before anything is offered and without any of it being cleaned up first. Scripture says God is near to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit, which is a sentence about where He stands rather than about how they are doing, and His Spirit is present in a field with somebody who cannot feel Him. Being unable to feel it is not the same as being outside it.

Oil is poured

Now hold the actual phrase, because it is a physical picture and the physics of it matter.

The oil of joy for mourning. Oil is not something a person generates. It is pressed out of something else, somewhere else, by somebody else, and then it is poured, onto a head, from above, by a hand that is not yours. Nobody in the history of the world has ever manufactured oil by wanting some.

You make known to me the path of life; in Your presence there is fullness of joy; at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.Psalm 16:11

Where is the joy in that verse? In His presence. Not in the reader's outlook, not in their gratitude practice, not in their capacity to rally. It is located in a Person, and the only thing a person can do with joy that is located somewhere else is receive it.

You have been trying to produce something that only ever arrives as a gift, and you are allowed to stop. The word puts the fullness in His presence rather than in your effort, and the Holy Spirit is named as the one in whom joy comes rather than as a mood you climb into. You are not failing at this. You were never the source.

And notice who it is for. The oil of joy is given to those who mourn. Not to those who have finished mourning, not to the ones who managed to move on within a reasonable period. To mourners, while they are mourning, which means the length of time this has taken disqualifies you from precisely nothing.