The Door Frame Is Not On The Form

The form has three columns and she has been at it since two o'clock.

Item. Age at loss. Replacement value. A neat grid of boxes and a note at the top asking her to be as accurate as she can, and she has been, all afternoon, at somebody else's table.

Some of it is easy. A washing machine is a washing machine. There is a strange comfort in a column that adds up.

Then she gets to the hall cupboard.

Her father's tools were in the hall cupboard. The wooden handled chisels with his initials burnt into them, which he did himself, badly, with a poker. She has typed assorted hand tools into the item box and now she is looking at the replacement value box and the cursor is going on and off, on and off.

Under that, a shoebox of letters. Her mother's handwriting on both sides of every page, thin blue airmail paper, forty years of them.

And there is no box on the form at all for the door frame. The one going through to the back room, with the pencil marks up the edge of it and a date beside each one, and one of them says her son's name at four and a half in her own writing. The frame is gone. So is the room. There is no line on this form where a person puts that.

Six weeks. The street has stopped bringing things round. The fire report came and went. Her brother rang every night for the first fortnight and now it is Sundays, which is right, because everybody goes back to their own life eventually and she would want them to.

She is in a flat that smells of other people's cooking. Her clothes are new and none of them are hers.

Somebody from church said it in the car park last week, and she meant it beautifully. God is going to pour abundance on you after all this, love. You wait and see.

She smiled and said thank you and drove back thinking: I do not know what that word is meant to mean, and every time somebody says it what I hear is a check, and I have not got one of those either.

Maybe that is where you are. A form in front of you and a lovely word in your ears that will not reach the ground you are standing on.

Let me say plainly what the word is not

I want this out of the way in the first minute, so that nothing below it is being quietly sold to you.

Abundance is not money. It is not a replacement value, not a settlement, not the total at the bottom of a schedule of loss. It is not a new hall cupboard and it is not the same house standing again on the same plot. I am not going to leave the word conveniently vague so it does a little work on you while you read, and I am not going to make you feel small for having hoped it meant a check, because nobody standing in a burnt house reaches for the sophisticated meaning first.

Here is the sentence the word actually comes out of.

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

Look at what the noun is. Life. That is the thing being handed over. Abundantly is not a second parcel with contents of its own, it is how much life. Over the brim, and not measured out against what a person managed this week.

So abundance means fullness of life, and that is the whole definition, and it is the only one this site will ever put in your hands.

You have it already, at a table with a biro and a form and a cursor going on and off, and I am not saying that because it is the kind thing to say at six weeks. It is written down in John 10 in the Shepherd's own words, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a person with nothing left to show anybody.

Six weeks is its own country

None of what I have just written puts the tools back in the cupboard, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I want to stay here a minute, because a page that hurries past six weeks has not understood what six weeks is. Six weeks is after the casseroles. It is the road going back to its own evenings, and the assessor having your claim number and a queue. It is opening a drawer in a flat and finding nothing of yours in it.

And I will not hand you the sentence about a reason. Not that a purpose sat behind the smoke, not that a lesson has been arranged inside it, not that gratitude for it is on its way later on. Those are the comfortable sentences, they are not true, and I will not put one in a woman's hands while ash is still coming out of the seam of a coat.

What is true is smaller and it carries more weight. You were not on your own in that house on the night it went, and you are not on your own at this table now. The word of God puts the Shepherd where the sheep actually is rather than where the sheep ought to have got to by now, and His Spirit does not stand at the edge of a ruin waiting for the ground to be tidy before He steps on to it.

What fullness looks like in a flat that is not yours

So what does it mean, then, if it is not the money and not the house. It means being able to feel something again. Ordinary tenderness coming back. It means being loved while producing nothing, which most of us were never taught and would not have chosen to learn this way. It means prayer that has stopped being a negotiation. It means sleeping. It means the small astonishing return of wanting anything at all.

Not one item on that list is a consolation prize handed over because the real thing was unavailable. Life, and more of it, was always the headline. Everything in the hall cupboard was scaffolding around a life, the scaffolding came down in a night, and the merciful truth is that the life is still standing inside the gap.

You are inside that fullness in the exact chair you are sitting in, with the form half done, and He is not waiting for you to be further along than this. That is not my encouragement. It is what the Shepherd said He came for in John 10, and the Holy Spirit is the One pressing it in.

The things that were never on the form

The door frame had no box because the form is for property, and the height marks were never property. They were love, written on wood in pencil. The chisels were not tools, they were a man's hands. The letters were not paper.

Which means the thing actually lost was never on the schedule in the first place, and neither is the thing God is giving. He is not working down a column. What He pours is life, into the person, and it does not arrive itemized.

You have been given something no form has a column for, and it was settled long before the fire and it is not under review now. Scripture calls Him the Shepherd who came for fullness and the God of all comfort, and the Holy Spirit is the One bringing it into a room that smells of other people's cooking.