The Feed Bucket Still In The Boot

He has stopped the car at the lane end again, which he told himself he would not do.

The gate is the one his father hung. He can see the weld on the second bar from here, always slightly proud, and the post that always leaned. There is a new chain on it. Blue, plastic coated, and a padlock that is not his.

Three months.

It went the way these things go, over a long time and then all at once, and there was a morning in February when the wagon came for the stock. That is the part he does not tell people about, and it is the part that arrives at four in the morning. Not the paperwork. The morning. Ninety minutes, start to finish, and the yard was quiet by half past nine in a way he had never once heard it.

Three generations in that ground. His grandfather took the tenancy. His father bought it. He worked it for thirty one years and there is a bit of him in every field of it, the drainage in the top corner that he did himself, the shelter belt he planted the year his daughter was born, which is now the height of a house.

The feed bucket is still in the boot. Black rubber, split at the rim, rolling about and knocking against the wheel arch. He has been meaning to take it out since February. He thinks about it at the lights in town, and every time he comes back to the car it is still there, and he shuts the boot on it again.

Three months. The neighbors were good and the neighbors are still good and the neighbors have their own silage to get in. His wife has been better about it than he has, or she has been better at the daytime, which is not the same thing.

What he has stopped saying out loud is this. He does not think he is going to feel anything good again. Not sad exactly. Flat. Somebody said something funny at the merchant last week and he heard that it was funny and did the face, and there was nothing behind it, and he has been thinking about that ever since.

So he is sitting in the car at the lane end at seven in the evening with the engine off, looking at a blue chain, and the bucket knocks once against the wheel arch as the car settles.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Not in the worst of it any more. Just fairly sure that the part of you that used to enjoy things has gone somewhere and is not coming back.

The word over this page, before anything is offered under it

Let me say plainly what the word means here, because three months of well meant sentences has probably worn a groove in you and I am not going to add to it.

Abundance is not money and it is not a mood. It is not the tenancy back, not the stock back, not a version of you that finds things funny on demand. It means fullness of life, and that is the whole of the definition, and there is nothing else quietly folded into it on this site.

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

The noun is life. Abundantly says how much. It does not say how you feel about it on a Thursday evening, and a man sitting in a car at a lane end looking at somebody else's padlock is inside that sentence exactly as he is.

You have that fullness at seven in the evening with the engine off, and I am not saying it to fill the quiet in the car. It is written in John 10 and spoken by a Shepherd about His own, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a man who has stopped expecting to feel anything, which is further in than a good sentence usually goes.

Whose joy it is

Here is where the category gets its name, and I want to read it slowly.

To give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning.Isaiah 61:3

Oil is poured. It is not worked up, not generated, not summoned by an effort of the will, and there is no version of that verse where the mourning person manufactures it and hands it to themselves. And read who it is given to. Mourning people. Not people who have finished mourning and are ready for the next thing. The oil is poured on the ones still in it.

And there is a sentence in Romans that puts the same thing in different clothes.

Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Spirit.Romans 15:13

Look at who does the filling. God does. Look at the power named at the end of it. Not the reader's. And note the word abound sitting there in the middle of a sentence about a filling that comes from outside the person, which is the same word this whole site is built on.

You are not the source of your own gladness and you never were, and that is written into Romans 15 as plainly as it can be put. The Holy Spirit is named in that verse as the power it comes through, which means the one thing you have been failing to produce was never assigned to you in the first place.

Nothing here is a substitute

Now I want to be careful, because joy is the word people reach for when they want a loss to stop being awkward, and I am not doing that.

The ground is gone. The gate has a blue chain on it and the wagon came in February and none of that is undone by anything on this page. If gladness ever comes near you again it is not a swap, it is not compensation, and it does not settle the account or make the ninety minutes acceptable. Anybody who offers you joy as a replacement for land is offering you an insult in a warm voice.

And nothing here promises you the feeling. I am not going to tell you when, or whether it arrives the way it used to, or that there is a morning coming with something behind the face. I do not know, and the verse does not say, and I am not going to improve on it.

You have not failed at anything by feeling flat for three months. There is no schedule in Scripture for this and no minimum standard of gladness required of a man who watched a yard go quiet at half past nine in the morning, and the Holy Spirit has never once treated an absence of feeling as an absence of faith.

What is actually being said is smaller and better than a promise about your mood. Joy is His to pour. It belongs to Him, it is described as coming from outside you, and it is aimed specifically at mourning people. So the posture is not effort. It is open hands.

You are handed something you do not have to manufacture, and Isaiah 61 says the oil is for mourning while Romans 15 puts the filling in God's own hands through His Spirit, and neither of them lays a single condition on the mourner. There is nothing for you to generate here tonight, and there never was.