The New Chain On The Gate

Tuesday, ten past four, and he has stopped the van at the top of the lane again.

He does not need to be on this road. There is a way round that adds eleven minutes and he took it for the first fortnight and then stopped taking it, and he could not tell you why he stopped.

The gate is the same gate. His grandfather hung it. But there is a new chain on it, galvanized, and a padlock that is not one of his, and somebody has cut the hedge back on the far side in a way that is perfectly correct and that he would never have done.

Eight weeks. The lorry came at ten past seven on a Wednesday and the whole thing took under two hours, which is the number that gets him, because it took three generations to put them in that field and it took one morning to take them off it. The dog went in the passenger footwell of the van and would not settle for a week, and then settled, and that was worse.

The paperwork is done. That is the phrase everybody uses. The paperwork is done, as though the paperwork was the thing.

What he cannot do, and he has tried, is picture next year. Not in a mournful way. He genuinely cannot get a picture. He sits with a cup of tea and tries to see March and there is nothing there, no image at all, not a good one and not a bad one, and it frightens him more than the lorry did.

A man at the market said, mate, God has got a plan for you. Big things. And he said aye. What he wanted to say and did not was: I am not asking for big. I am asking for any. I cannot see one single thing.

Maybe that is where you are. Not despairing exactly. Just standing in front of a year with no picture in it at all, and everybody around you talking as though the picture is the easy part.

The word on the sign, before anything else

Abundance here is never money and it is never land. It is fullness of life, and I want that said before anything at all is offered under the word, because a man who has just watched a field change hands is entitled to know what is being sold to him and what is not.

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

Life is the thing in the sentence. Abundantly is how much of it. Not acreage, not stock, not a picture of March with something good in it. Fullness of life, and the word will not be widened later on to include the field.

And you have it eight weeks out, at the top of a lane, in a stopped van. That is not a nice thing to say to a man in a hard month, it is what is written in John 10 about the Shepherd and the life He came for, and the Holy Spirit carries it into somebody who cannot picture a single day past tomorrow.

What the verse about the unimaginable does not do

There is a line people reach for at exactly this point, and it is usually used as a trailer for something. It is worth reading it for what it says.

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.1 Corinthians 2:9

Notice what the sentence does. It does not describe anything. It says the opposite: that this is not available to the eye, not available to the ear, and not something the heart has managed to construct. So when a man says he cannot picture next year, he has not failed at a thing Scripture asked him to do. Nowhere in that verse is anybody instructed to imagine it. The verse says prepared, and prepared is a word about somebody else's hands.

So take that off yourself tonight. You are not required to be able to see it, and the word of God puts the seeing beyond the eye on purpose rather than as a compliment, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds a person steady in a year they cannot picture instead of handing them a picture to hold in His place.

And I am not going to describe it either. I could. It is the easiest paragraph in the world to write and it always goes down well, and it would be me inventing contents for a verse that deliberately lists none, and handing a man in a van a picture I made up. What is prepared is prepared by God, and neither I nor anybody at a market knows one item in it.

Kept is a different word from coming

There is a difference between saying a thing is coming and saying a thing is kept, and the second is the one Scripture is actually doing. Coming has a date in it and an inventory behind it, and I have neither. Kept says only that it is not on him to hold, which is a much smaller sentence than the one at the market, and it is one I can say without inventing anything.

So here it is at its actual size. You are held while the year is blank, and that is written into a verse about things the heart has never once managed to construct, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the holding tonight in a van at the top of a lane with the engine off.

Tomorrow is a legitimate size

Nothing here asks anybody for hope as a feeling, because there are weeks when there is none available, and a page that requires it has just locked the door on the reader it was written for. You have been carried through eight weeks already without producing an ounce of it, and Scripture never once made the preparing depend on the receiver's ability to look forward, and it is His Spirit who has been doing the carrying whether or not anything was felt.