The Box Is Still In The Hall

The box is by the coats, where it has been since the second week of February.

Inside it: a bunch of keys on a loop of blue cord, a projector remote with the battery cover missing, a box of tea lights, a laminated welcome sign with a scuff across it, and a travel kettle that was never his. Somebody was supposed to collect it. Somebody said they would, and meant it at the time, and then the weeks did what weeks do.

Ten months. That is the part he cannot get his head around. Not that it ended, but that it ended and then kept on being over, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday.

It went in about nine days. A meeting, then a second meeting, then a message to everybody, then a last morning in the hired hall with forty chairs out and nineteen people in them and nobody able to look at anybody. It took his work, his church and most of his friends in the same nine days, which happens to almost nobody else and is very hard to explain at a party.

The group chat is still on his phone. Nobody has left it. Nobody has posted in it since March. He opens it about once a fortnight, reads the last four messages, and puts the phone face down.

The others have landed, and he is glad about it, he genuinely is. Two families are at the big place on the ring road and one of them sends photographs of their daughter in the youth band. He is happy for them in the way people are happy while something in the chest is doing something else entirely.

On this particular Sunday he is in a supermarket car park at twenty to eleven, because that is where he has ended up driving on Sunday mornings, and he is not going in. His hands are on the wheel at ten to two. There is a hymn on the radio because he put it on and then could not turn it off.

Somebody messaged him in the week to say that God was doing a new thing and that he should not despise the day of small beginnings. He read it four times looking for the way in and could not find one.

Maybe that is where you are. Ten months, or fourteen, and the thing that ended has not stopped ending. Everyone who was kind at the time has gone back to their lives, because they have lives, and you cannot even be angry about it.

The word on the sign, before anything else

Somebody sent you here, or you typed the name in yourself, and either way I will deal with the word first so that it is not sitting between us.

Abundance does not mean money. Not on this page and not in the verse it comes from. It means fullness of life, which is a strange thing to say to a man in a supermarket car park at twenty to eleven, and I am going to say it anyway and then leave it alone for a while. Nothing here is offered to you under that word except life, and I am not going to trade on the ambiguity for a single paragraph.

If you came to a page called this half hoping it meant something practical, I understand that and I am not going to be clever about it. People standing in ruins reach for the plain thing first.

You have not been shut out of that word by ten months, and I am not leaving it to be inferred. It is John 10:10, where the Shepherd names life as the thing He came to give, and the Holy Spirit takes a sentence like that into a car with the engine off.

Ten months is a long time to be in a hall

Here is what I am not going to do with this article. I am not going to lift you out of it.

There is a whole industry of getting people moved along. Somebody rings at week three and it is soup and sitting with you, and somebody rings at month ten and it is a link to a conference. The message about the new thing was sent by somebody who loves you, and it landed like a shove, because a person in ashes hears new thing as an instruction to stop being where they are.

So I am going to stay in the hall. The forty chairs, the nineteen people, the box by the coats that nobody came for. I am not going to tell you there was a purpose folded inside it, or that the whole thing was building toward something not yet visible. I do not know that, nobody does, and a man who says it to you at month ten is guessing with your life.

You are met here, in the exact car park, on the exact Sunday, with the radio on and no intention of going in. That is not my sympathy. Scripture says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes near mean near rather than mean well.

What near actually is

Near is the hardest one to believe at ten months, because near ought to feel like something and most days it does not.

I am not going to tell you that if the feeling had been there it would have counted for more, or that the numbness is a gap in you. The Bible keeps a whole book of songs sung by people who could not feel God and said so out loud to His face, and they were kept in the same book as the glad ones, because both of them are prayer.

You have been held every one of those ten months, including the Sundays in the car park, including the fortnight you did not pray at all, and none of that is a reward for handling it well. It is written into what God says about Himself, that He does not leave and does not let go, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding it steady over a person who cannot feel a thing.

Fullness, when the room is empty

I said I would come back to the word, so here it is, and it requires nothing of you.

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

The fullness in that sentence was never sized to a congregation. Not to a room count, not to a role, not to how many people were in the group chat in March. It was sized to a person. The work was real and it is not what made anybody full, and losing it did not take the fullness out, because the fullness was never in the building.

That is worth sitting with rather than agreeing to.

You are not less of a Christian at month ten than you were on the last good Sunday, and that is not encouragement. It is what the word says about how God counts a person, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the counting rather than the room.

Staying, as an actual instruction

There is a kind of faith that is only ever measured by movement, and it has nothing to say to month ten, so I am not going to hand it to you.

Sitting down where you happen to be, and saying one true sentence about it, is not defeat and it is not unbelief. It is what half the Psalms do in their opening lines. The man who wrote that God is near to the brokenhearted was not describing a mood he was in, he was saying where God stands, and where God stands does not move when a hall gets handed back.

You were not left in that hall, and you are not being waited out until you are more useful, and I am not making that up to be kind. It is written all through the Scriptures that God stays with people in the part of the story that has no visible point, and His Spirit is the one who carries that into a car at twenty to eleven.