The Medal Goes Back In The Drawer

Sunday, about half three, and he is sitting on the end of the bed with the drawer open.

It is the bedside drawer, so it is batteries and a phone charger with a bent end and a spare key to a door that is not his any more. And underneath all of it, face down, the bronze one. Fourteen years. He does not take it out often. Today he takes it out, turns it over twice with his thumb the way you do with a coin, and puts it back under the charger where it lives.

Four years. Four years since the Tuesday, and the Tuesday is not the point, and he has never once tried to make it somebody else's. He knows what he did. He knew it while he was doing it, which is the part nobody ever believes.

What went with it went quickly. The job first, and that was fair. Then the house, and the house was not only his to lose, which is the thing he thinks about at half three on a Sunday. Then the slow one, the one with no date on it, which is a daughter who still texts and does not ring.

The flat is above a launderette and it smells of other people's washing on a warm day, which is not a bad smell. There is a chair, a kettle, a window that looks at a wall. Four years is long enough that nobody is angry any more. Everybody has gone back to their lives and they were right to. Nobody phones to shout and nobody phones to check, and of the two he could not honestly tell you which he misses.

The third Sunday used to be the day the boy came. He still keeps the afternoon clear. He has not told anyone that and he is not going to.

Somebody at the door of a church, eighteen months ago, told him warmly that God had a plan in all of it. He nodded and got out.

Maybe that is where you are. Not in the crisis, because the crisis had people in it. In the fourth year, in a quiet flat, on an afternoon you kept clear for nobody.

The word on the sign, first

The name of this site has abundance in it, and I want that dealt with before anything at all is offered under it. Abundance here is not money, and it is not a clean record either, which for a man with a bronze disc in a drawer is the more tempting of the two misreadings. It is fullness of life. That is the whole of it, and this page will not quietly leave the word wide so it does a bit of work on somebody who is four years hungry.

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

The noun in that sentence is life. Abundantly tells you how much of it, not what comes with it. Fullness of life, and not one line in the verse about a record, a house, a job, or a Sunday with a boy in it. That is what is on offer, and it is the only thing this page will ever put under the word.

And you have it in the fourth year, not at the end of some recovery you have to produce first. That is not my encouragement. It is what is written in John 10 about a Shepherd and His own, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a room that smells of a launderette.

Nothing here is going to move you on

So let me say what this page is not doing. It is not handing you a stage, a step, a next thing or a chart. It is not going to tell you what to do about the daughter who texts, because that is hers and not mine and not this article's. It is not going to work out how much of the four years was yours, and it is not going to pretend that none of it was, because mercy that needs an audit first is not mercy, and mercy that needs a lie is not mercy either.

Here is what is actually true on that bed. You are not being asked to be further along before God comes into the room, because Psalm 34 puts the Lord near to the broken hearted and saving those who are crushed in spirit, with no condition attached about how the crushing happened, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes near mean near rather than theoretical.

Read that verse slowly, because the second half of it does work the first half does not. Near to the broken hearted is comfort. Saves such as be of a contrite spirit is something else. A contrite and crushed spirit is the state of a person who has run out of the strength to be different, and Scripture does not treat it as disqualifying. It treats it as an address.

So take it in the fourth year, in the flat above the launderette, on the third Sunday. You have been sat with. Not observed and not managed, sat with, and the word of God says the Lord is near without waiting for a change of address, and it is His Spirit doing the sitting while the drawer is still open.

Four years is its own kind of quiet

Nobody warns anybody about the fourth year. The first year has people in it: phone calls, opinions, somebody's sister, a solicitor. By the fourth the file is closed on everybody else's desk, and the only person still standing in the room is the one who lives there. That is not neglect, it is arithmetic, and it is also the loneliest arithmetic there is.

And that room is exactly where you were found. Not tidied first and not summarized, found, and it is written into the shape of everything Jesus did with the people He went looking for, and the same Spirit who moved Him toward them is the one in a first floor flat on a Sunday afternoon.