Something Is Coming Up In This Room

He took a photograph of the door frame before they handed the keys in, because a man cannot take a door frame with him.

Six pencil marks up the white gloss, with dates beside them in his wife's handwriting, going up in uneven steps from when their daughter was two. It is on his phone. He has looked at it perhaps forty times in ten weeks, always late, in the dark, with the brightness turned right down so the room does not light up.

The room is not theirs. It is a decent room in a decent house and the woman who rents it to them is a good woman. There is a wardrobe in it that came with the room, and the three of them and everything they own are in here and in half a garage across town. Their daughter sleeps by the window. She is seven and she thinks it is temporary in the way that seven year olds are able to.

Ten weeks. The redundancy was in the spring, the letters started in the summer, and the keys went into an envelope on a Tuesday. Here is what ten weeks is. The people who turned up with their cars and their boxes on the weekend of the move were magnificent and they have all gone back to their own lives, correctly. The last of the practical help was a man who came round with a drill. Nobody knocks now.

And what he does, every night, is go round the month of March again. He knows exactly which fortnight it was. He knows the letter he did not open for four days. He knows the job in the next county he did not go for because of the school. He goes round it and round it and round it with the brightness turned down.

On Sunday somebody at church said, with a completely straight face and real faith behind it, that God restores everything the locusts have eaten and that they would have it all back and more than they started with, watch and see.

He said amen, because what else does a man say in a doorway. But walking out to the car he thought: I do not think that is true. I do not think we get the door frame back. And if the whole of my faith is resting on a bigger place arriving, then I have got nothing at all to stand on tonight, because there is nothing like that coming and I know it.

Maybe that is where you are. Not able to say the bright sentence any more, and not at all sure what is left once you stop saying it.

The word first, because this is the room where it does most damage

There is a word on the front of this site and in a rented room it can do real harm if nobody stops it, so let me stop it now.

Abundance is not money and it is not a set of keys. It is not a mortgage put right, it is not a return to the postcode, and it is not the same address with the same door frame standing in it. The word means fullness of life. John 10 has the Shepherd saying He came so that His own would have life and have it over the brim, and the noun in that sentence is life. Not property. Life.

I am saying it that plainly because the alternative is a page that lets a man in a rented room hope for something it has no business promising, and then leaves him worse off in a fortnight than it found him.

You have fullness offered to you in this room, tonight, with the wardrobe that is not yours against the wall and your daughter asleep by the window. Not once the housing is sorted out. Here. That is written into John 10 rather than into my opinion of anybody's situation, and the Holy Spirit takes a written promise and makes it arrive in a room where a man is lying awake going round March.

People keep saying it will all come back

Let me take the thing that was said in that church doorway, because it gets said everywhere, and it gets said kindly, and it does damage.

Nowhere does God guarantee any particular person a replacement of what they lost. There are people in the Scriptures who got things back and there are people who did not, and the ones who did not are never presented as the failures. Paul does not get the thorn removed. The man who wrote Lamentations does not see the city rebuilt. A whole passage of Hebrews eleven is about people commended by God who died without receiving what had been promised to them.

So I am not going to tell you that this is a season with a scheduled end, or that in a few years it will all make sense from a distance. I am not putting a forecast in your hands dressed up as faith.

You have something steadier than a forecast tonight, which is a Person who has not left this room since the boxes came in, and the word of God gives His presence as the promise rather than giving anybody a description of next year. it is His Spirit who makes that read like company instead of like theology.

What Isaiah actually says about oaks

Here is the verse this whole site is named out of, and it is worth reading slowly rather than at speed.

to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord.Isaiah 61:3

Read what is planted, and read who does the planting. Oaks, and the Lord. It does not say the burnt ground gets rebuilt to the original drawings. It does not say when. It does not describe the tree at all. Anybody who tells you it means a house is putting words into it, and anybody who tells you it means nothing is doing the same thing from the other side of the room.

You are His planting rather than your own project, and that is the phrase Isaiah 61 actually uses, and His Spirit is the one who does the growing in ground that a man is quite certain is finished. That takes the weight off the man, which is the entire point of who is named as the gardener.

Something is already up in that room

So here is the thing I want to hand over, and it is small, and small is the correct size for it.

Something is already growing in that room, and it is not the thing that was lost, and it is not a copy of it, and it is not a compensation for it either. It is easy to miss, because it is unimpressive, and because a man going round March every night is not looking at the floor.

His daughter reads to him now, in a room where all three of them can hear each other, which never happened in the old house because everybody had a floor of their own to be on. The woman downstairs knocks on Fridays with a bit of cake and no agenda whatsoever. He prays now, badly, in short sentences, which is more than he managed in ten years of a mortgage. None of that is a fair exchange for a home and I am not pretending that it is. It is simply alive, and it is here, and it did not come from him.

You have been given green things in burnt ground, and the word of God says the Lord plants them Himself rather than requiring the ground to explain itself first, and the Holy Spirit is the one growing what is coming up in that room while a man lies there certain that nothing is.