The Chip In The Coat Pocket

The coat was on the back of the door and he only put his hand in the pocket because there was a bus timetable in there he wanted.

It was under the timetable. Bronze, worn smooth on one face, the number stamped in the middle of it. Eleven.

He sat down on the arm of his friend's sofa holding it, which is a stupid place to sit, and he stayed there.

Eleven years. He had done the whole thing. The early mornings. The phone calls he made instead of the ones he wanted to make. The Christmas he got through by walking around a retail park for two hours. He had been the one other people rang. He had sat with men in car parks at half eleven at night and told them it was survivable, and he had believed it, and it was true.

Five weeks ago it stopped being eleven years.

He can trace it. That is the part he has not said out loud to anybody. He can lay it out in order, every step, and there was no ambush in it and no bolt from anywhere. He knows the afternoon. He knows the decision before the decision. He does not need anybody to explain to him what happened, and he is not confused about whose hands were on it.

What went with it: the job, because of what the job was. The flat, because the flat was tied to the job. His daughter, who has not said anything cruel and has not said very much at all, which is worse, and who took the spare key off her ring without making a thing of it.

He is on Ade's sofa. Ade has been decent about it in a way that makes his chest hurt. There is a folded blanket at one end and a plug socket he has claimed and a carrier bag with his stuff in it that he keeps meaning to unpack into something.

Five weeks. The frantic part is over. Nobody is ringing round about him now. The house is quiet in the afternoon because Ade is at work, and the heating clicks, and he is sitting on the arm of a sofa holding a bronze disc with the number eleven on it and there is nobody in the room to perform anything for.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Not bewildered. Not asking why. Sitting in a thing you can account for, holding the evidence of who you used to be, with the whole story lined up in you and nobody asking for it.

What the word means here, before anything is offered under it

Before a single thing is handed to you on this page, I want to say plainly what the word over it means, because you did not come here to be sold anything and I am not going to trade on a hopeful ambiguity.

Abundance is not money and it is not a clean record. It is not the eleven years back, not the flat, not the key back on the ring, and it is not a fresh start priced at a full account of yourself. It means fullness of life, and that is all it has ever meant here.

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

The noun is life. Abundantly is not an extra parcel with contents; it says how much life. And nothing in that sentence has a clause about who caused what, which is the first thing worth noticing on somebody else's sofa with the whole chain of events in your head.

You have that fullness available to you on a Tuesday afternoon in week five, and that is not me being nice. It is written in John 10 and it is spoken by a Shepherd, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that past a man's own opinion of himself, which is the hardest door in the house.

The kindness that arrives before the account

Here is the thing I am not going to do. I am not going to go through it with you. Not the afternoon, not the decision before the decision, not the ordering of any of it. That has been done already, more times than anybody knows, and my adding to it would be cruelty with a Bible open on the table.

And I am not going to do the other thing either, the one that gets called grace and is not. I am not going to tell you it was not really yours, or that anyone would have, or that circumstances did it. You would not believe me, and you would be right not to, and a mercy that needs the facts adjusted first is not mercy, it is a story.

So here is the sentence, and read where it puts the timing.

God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

While. Not afterwards. Not once it was accounted for, not once the ledger was straight, not at the end of an explanation. The love was demonstrated in the middle of the thing, and the middle is where it was aimed, and that is not a loophole in the gospel. That is the gospel.

You are loved in the wreckage you had a hand in, and I am not softening that sentence at either end. It is what Romans 5 says in plain words, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it land somewhere other than your ears, because a man in week five can quote that verse and still not be in the room with it.

What He is not doing with it

He is not holding it over you. I want to say that on its own line, because held over is exactly what it feels like from in here, and the feeling is a very convincing witness.

Scripture has a strange and specific way of putting this. It says He has not dealt with us after our sins, and that as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. East from west is not a distance you can shorten by walking. North and south have poles and meet. East and west never do. The measurement was chosen.

You have not been put outside the reach of His kindness by anything in the last five weeks. That is written, and I am not the one who wrote it, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a room where the heating clicks and nobody is watching, which is where a man actually finds out whether he believes something.

His kindness toward you this afternoon is not conditional on how any of it started. It is not a reward at the end of a process and it is not held back pending a full statement. Scripture calls His mercies new every morning, and morning is not a milestone anybody earns, and the Holy Spirit did not make an exception for week five of the worst thing you have done.

I am not going to extract a lesson from the collapse. There is no lesson here that is mine to give you and I am not going to dress one up. What there is, is a man on a sofa with a bronze disc in his hand, and a God who moved toward people while they were still in the middle of it, and those two facts in the same room this afternoon.