The Crate Still In The Boot

Twenty to eleven on a Sunday and he is parked in the lay by above the reservoir with a flask he did not really want.

The crate is in the boot. Blue plastic, the sort that stacks, and it has been in there ten weeks. A kettle. A carrier bag of tea lights. The folder of song sheets in plastic wallets, alphabetical, because he was the sort of person who kept them alphabetical. A roll of blue tack gone gray. The lanyards with everybody's names printed on them, all thirty odd, in a freezer bag with an elastic band round it.

He cannot take it in the house. He cannot put it in the tip either. So it rides around with him, and the shopping goes in next to it, and once a week he moves it to get the spare wheel out for something and puts it straight back.

Ten weeks. The room they rented is a soft play on Sundays now, which he found out by accident, and he does not think that is funny yet and suspects he might in about two years.

The thing people do not understand, if they have not had it happen, is the arithmetic of that week. The work went, which is the part they can see. But the work was the church, and the church was the friends, and the friends were the diary, so it was not one loss with knock on effects. It was four walls and a roof going at once and nobody to ring about it, because the people you would ring are inside the thing that went.

He is not bitter. That surprises him. There is nobody in this story he wants named and nothing he wants said about anybody, and the people who were there were doing their best in something that had got away from all of them.

He just cannot see next year.

That is the actual problem, sitting in a lay by with a flask. When he tries to picture the next twelve months there is not a bad picture there, there is no picture at all, a flat gray nothing where the future used to run, and the not being able to see it frightens him considerably more than any of the rest of it.

Somebody said, at the end, that God had big plans. He nodded. He has thought about that sentence perhaps four hundred times since, and every time it is like being handed a sealed envelope and told to be pleased.

Maybe that is where you are. Sunday morning, nowhere on earth expecting you, and nothing at all in your head when you try to look ahead.

First the word, before it gets used on you again

Abundance is not a platform back.

It is not a room with your people in it, it is not the diary full again, it is not a role, and it is not money, and I am not going to leave the word half open so a man can quietly read a future into it. Abundance means fullness of life. That is the definition, and on this page it never means anything else.

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

You have that in a lay by, on a Sunday, at twenty to eleven, with no idea what any of it looks like from here. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own words, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a man who cannot see twelve months ahead.

I am not going to describe your future to you

That has been done to you already and it cost something.

Somebody says God has big plans and hands you a sealed envelope, and the sentence is not a lie exactly, it is just that it was a description with nothing in it, given to a man who needed something he could hold. And after a while a person stops asking, because every time the envelope gets handed over and nothing is inside it, the not knowing gets heavier rather than lighter.

So there will be no description here. I do not know what next year holds and neither does anybody who has told you that they do.

What is written down is not a picture of the future. It is a hand.

My times are in Your hand.Psalm 31:15

Look at what that sentence gives and what it withholds. It does not give the man saying it a single detail. It does not tell him the outcome, the month, the shape of it, or whether the thing he lost comes back in any form at all. It tells him where his times are being kept, and it turns out that this is the part he actually needed.

You are held in the hand your times are in, and that is a finished arrangement rather than a hope you are working up. It is written in Psalm 31 by a man who could not see his own way out of anything, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a fact in a car rather than a line in a book.

Not being able to picture it is not a failure

This is the part I want to be careful about, because you may have been quietly blaming yourself for it.

Losing the ability to imagine the future is what happens to people after a collapse. It is not unbelief. It is not a lack of vision. It is the ordinary shape of a mind that has had the next twelve months removed at short notice, and it is what happens in a body under strain, and it is not a spiritual fault to be corrected before God will deal with you.

Ask anybody who has come through a redundancy, or a bereavement, or a collapse of any kind at all. The picture goes first and it goes quietly, and most of them never mention it to a soul, because they take it for a fault in themselves rather than the plain arithmetic of a mind with a year taken off it at no notice.

And nowhere in the written word is anybody required to picture the future in order to be kept in it. There is no verse where a man has to see it first. The keeping is done by the One whose hand it is in.

You are kept, and being unable to imagine tomorrow does not weaken the hold one bit. That is Psalm 31 putting the times in God's hand rather than in the imagination of the person living them, and it is the Spirit who makes a grip like that felt by somebody sitting above a reservoir with a flask.

Ten weeks

Ten weeks is when the last of the messages have stopped and the practical help has finished and everybody who scattered has landed somewhere.

They are not being unfaithful. Ten weeks is simply when other people's lives close over a thing, and it is the loneliest arithmetic in this whole business: the crisis ends and the absence starts, and the absence has no date in the diary and nobody brings anything round for it.

You are not forgotten in the ten weeks, whatever the phone has been doing. Scripture never once ties God's attention to how many people are asking after a man, and His Spirit, the Comforter, did not scatter when the congregation did.