The Key That Opens Nothing

The key is still on his ring.

It is the front door one, the brass one with the worn shoulder, and it has been on that ring for nine years and it opens nothing now. He noticed it on the second day and he has not taken it off. He gets his keys out forty times a day and every single time his thumb finds it first.

They are in a rented room above a hairdresser's, the four of them, and it is clean, and the woman who owns it has been decent about the travel cot. His wife has been extraordinary. His youngest thinks it is an adventure and keeps calling it the holiday, and that is the sentence that gets him at night.

Six weeks since the keys went back in a brown envelope across a desk, handed to a man who did the paperwork kindly, which somehow made it worse.

The crisis is over. That is what nobody tells you. The letters have stopped, because there is nothing left to write to him about. The phone calls have stopped. Two people from work rang for a fortnight and then quite properly went back to their own lives, and he does not blame them for one second of it.

What is left is a Tuesday afternoon in a rented room with the curtains half shut, and the month. He goes back over the month the way you go back over a step you missed on the stairs. Sits it down, walks it through, arrives at the same place, starts again. He has done it so many times it has worn a groove. He knows every turning in it. He knows exactly where he was standing and what he decided and what he did not do, and he will not be told none of it mattered, because he was there.

Nobody has said a word to him. That is not it at all. He says it to himself, all day, in a voice he would never use on another human being.

Maybe that is where you are. Not being accused by anyone. Just unable to stop prosecuting yourself in a small room, while everybody else has gone back to their evenings.

First, the word on the sign

I want to deal with the word straight away, because for a man in a rented room the name of this site reads like a taunt, and I am not going to leave it doing that to you while you read.

You already know what your head does with the word. It does arrears, and it does a deposit, and it does the thing nobody says out loud, which is that you would take a check today over almost anything else on offer. Abundance is not money. There is no version of it on this page that is a roof or a figure, and I am not letting the word stay usefully vague for three paragraphs so it can work on you quietly.

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

The noun is life. Abundantly describes how much of it. Fullness of life, over the brim, and it is handed to people rather than earned by them, which is the whole reason it can arrive in a rented room above a shop.

You have that, and it is not being priced against the month you keep going back over. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own voice, and the Holy Spirit gets a line like that past a man's own verdict on himself.

Mercy is not a verdict with the sentence suspended

Here is what I am not going to do. I am not going to go through the month with you. I am not going to sort out which parts of it were yours and which parts were the redundancy and which parts were nobody's. And I am not going to tell you the parts that were yours were not yours either, because that is the kind lie, and it does as much damage as the cruel one: a man told that nothing was his knows better, and stops believing anything else he is told.

God does neither. Read what Lamentations actually does. A man sits in a ruined city and lists it, page after page, and in the middle of the listing he says this.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 and 23

You are met with mercy this morning that has nothing to do with how the month went. That is not a soft reading of the text, it is what the text says: not ceasing, not ending, new this morning, written by a man looking at actual rubble, and it is the Holy Spirit who hands it over without an audit.

Notice the word new. Not renewed, not topped up, not extended as a courtesy for a while longer. New, this morning, as though nothing at all had been drawn on it. There is no running total on the back of it.

You are loved in the wreckage, and it is not conditional on how the wreckage started. Lamentations puts God's kindness on God's side of the sentence and not on the rubble's, and His Spirit is the one carrying it up two flights of stairs into a room above a hairdresser's.

The one thing that is actually yours to do

There is one thing here that is yours, and it is not a full confession and it is not a review of the month. It is one sentence.

Say the part that was yours. Out loud, plainly, in your own words, without the excuse fastened to it and without the flourish of self hatred fastened to it either, because both of those are ways of keeping hold of a thing. And then hand it over in the same breath. Not analyzed. Handed.

You are not on trial in that room. The written word says His mercies are new this morning, a sentence set down before you were born and not adjusted since, and His Spirit is the one who makes handing something over feel like putting it down rather than losing an argument.

What fullness looks like above a hairdresser's

So what is being given, if it is not the house and not money.

It means being in the room with your own family without the running commentary going underneath it. It means an hour that is not the month. It means prayer that stops being a plea for a hearing. It means laughing at something your youngest says instead of hearing the word holiday and flinching. It means being loved while there is nothing at all to put on the table, which almost nobody learns any other way.

You were loved through every hour of those six weeks, including the ones at four in the morning that you would not describe to anybody. Lamentations says the steadfast love never ceased, and never is a word with no gaps in it, and the Holy Spirit is the witness to hours you cannot remember being carried through.