The Bag That Did Not Fit In The Van

Quarter past two on a Wednesday and the flat is hers alone for another hour.

The bag is by the door where the men put it, a big blue woven laundry bag with the plastic handles, and it is the one thing that did not fit in the van. Everything else got a place. That got a corner. Three weeks and nobody has opened it, and she thinks she knows why, and it is because of what is in it: the bread bin, a curtain pole with no curtains, the shoebox of school photographs, and the length of white painted door frame her husband unscrewed and took because the children's heights were pencilled up it.

She sits down on the floor next to it with her back against the radiator, which is a thing she has started doing.

The rented place is fine. Two bedrooms, the boy and the girl in together, a landlord who has been decent about it. The smell is the thing. It is not a bad smell. It is just not theirs, and every morning for three weeks she has woken up in a room that smells like a stranger's coat.

And what she does, every afternoon, on this floor, is the same. She goes back to a month in the autumn. She walks through it again the way you would walk through a field looking for a dropped ring, over and over, in case this is the time she finds the afternoon where a different phone call happened.

The first week there was a lasagne on the step twice and a woman from church who cried more than she did. The second week there were messages. This week the group chat is about somebody's kitchen extension, and everybody has gone back to their own lives, which is right, and which is exactly what she would do, and which is also the loneliest thing she has ever sat inside.

Her daughter asked on Sunday where the bread bin was.

Somebody said the word abundance over her three weeks ago, with a hand on her arm, at the church door. They said it into a face that had signed the papers eleven days before. They meant it. They will never know what it landed on.

Maybe that is where you are. Not in the crisis, because the crisis part is over, and everybody has gone home, and nothing is on fire any more. Just sitting on a floor beside a bag that nobody has opened, in a room that smells like somebody else.

The word first, because it has already been said over you

Somebody put a hand on your arm and used it, and they meant it kindly, so let me take it apart before it does any more work on you.

Abundance does not mean a set of keys. It does not mean a front door with your own name behind it, it does not mean the rooms back, and it is not money, and I am not going to hold the word loosely so that a bit of hope for the wrong thing can grow up inside it while you read. It means fullness of life. That is the whole of it, and it is the only meaning this page will ever hand you.

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

Life is the noun. Everything else in that sentence is a description of how much of it.

You have that on the floor of a rented room, and I am not saying so to move you off the floor. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own words, and the Holy Spirit takes a written line and gets it as far in as three weeks of this goes.

Three weeks is its own country

Nothing I have said gets that door frame back on a wall.

Three weeks is a particular place and I would rather sit down in it than walk you through it. Three weeks is when the food stops arriving and the messages thin out and the group chat moves on to somebody's extension, and none of that is anybody being unfaithful to you, it is just what three weeks does. It is your daughter asking where the bread bin is in a voice that has no idea. It is the smell of a room that is not yours. It is going back to the same month every afternoon on the same patch of floor, hunting for the phone call that would have changed it.

I am not going to move you on from that, and I am not going to hand you a verse as a way of closing the subject. A verse used to end a conversation is a door shutting, and there has been enough of that.

You are met here. Not further along, not once the bag has been opened, not when you can talk about it without your voice doing what it does: here, on this floor, at quarter past two. Psalm 34 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit, and it is His Spirit who makes that nearness something a person can feel in the room rather than a nice line in a book.

Look at what that psalm actually does with the word near. It does not say He is watching from a reasonable distance until the family has found its feet again. Near is a word about proximity. It is about who is close enough to touch. The written word puts God at close quarters with people whose hearts are in pieces, and it makes no comment at all about how well they are managing it.

You were not left on the day the keys went across the desk. Not in that room, not on the drive back, not on the first night in a bed that was not yours. That is not a comforting thing to say, it is what Psalm 34 claims about where God stands when a person is crushed, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that claim into a Wednesday afternoon three weeks later.

What being met actually is

It is not a lift. I want to be honest about that, because being lifted is what everybody offers and it is not what is on the table this afternoon.

Being met is somebody sitting down on the floor at the same height as you and not looking at the clock. It is presence without an agenda for your recovery. It is the absence of that particular silence people leave after they ask how things are and get the truth.

You are held right now, in the exact place you are sitting, and He is not waiting for you to be further along than this. That is not my encouragement. That is what the Shepherd said He came for in John 10, and it is His Spirit who carries it into a person who has nothing at all to show.

And nothing about that requires you to feel it this afternoon. Feeling is weather. What Scripture says about where God stands is not weather, and the Spirit does not withdraw from a room because the person in it has gone numb.

You have not been moved on from, and nobody upstairs is impatient with how long this is taking. There is not a line in the written word that puts a clock on grief, and the Comforter is named for what He does rather than for how quickly He does it.