The Number On The Coin

The coin is brass and it has a number on it that is not true any more.

He keeps it in the pocket of his work coat, and the coat is on the hook by the door of a rented room above a chip shop, and it has not been worn for work in fourteen months because there is no work to wear it to. Tuesday afternoon, half past three, the fryers going on downstairs. He is sitting on the end of the bed turning the coin over the way a man turns a thing he cannot put down and cannot look at either.

Nine years. That is what the number says. Nine years, and then a Thursday in March that he could tell you about in full detail if you asked him, and he will not, because he has told it now to enough rooms.

What went with it: the van, and the job the van came with. His daughter's texts, which used to arrive on a Sunday and now arrive at Christmas. The key, put down on the kitchen counter and pushed across, and his wife not crying, which was worse.

Fourteen months is a strange distance to be standing at. The emergency part is finished. Nobody rings now with that particular tone in their voice. The people who came round in the first weeks have gone back to their own lives, which is right and proper and he does not begrudge a single one of them. What is left is a Tuesday, and a coat on a hook, and a number in his palm that belonged to a man he used to be.

A woman from the church caught him outside the shop last week and put her hand on his arm and said, God has abundance for you, love. She meant every syllable of it kindly. He said thanks. He walked home with his bag and thought: that word again. Everybody keeps handing me that word like it is a parcel. And every time I hear it, what I hear is money, and I have none of that either, and if it turned up tomorrow it would not buy back a Sunday text.

Maybe that is roughly where you are sitting. Somebody gave you a beautiful sentence out of Isaiah and you could not make it reach the floor under your feet. And if you came to a page with this name over the door half hoping the word meant something you could bank, I am not going to make you feel small about that. Nobody standing in a ruin hopes for the sophisticated thing first.

What the word actually says

Abundance is not money. It is not the van back, it is not the nine years back, and it is not a quiet reversal of the March you do not talk about. I am not going to leave the word conveniently blurry so it does a little work on you while you read, and I am not going to smile at anybody who came here hoping otherwise.

Here is the sentence the word actually lives in.

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 on offer. Abundantly is not a second parcel with contents of its own, it is a measure word, and what it measures is life. Full. Over the brim. Not counted out with a small cup, and not matched to whatever a person has managed lately.

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

You are inside that sentence this afternoon, in a rented room over a chip shop, with a coat on a hook that has not been to work since last spring. That is not my encouragement talking. It is written in John 10, it is the Shepherd's own word about what He came for, and the Holy Spirit carries a line that size past the shame and into a man with nothing whatever to show for himself.

Fourteen months is its own country

Nothing I have written fills the diary or gets a Sunday text back.

I want to stay in that room a minute, because a page that hurries past fourteen months has not understood what fourteen months is. It is when the crisis has finished and the life has not restarted. It is when the people who sat up with you night after night went back to their own kitchens, rightly, and the phone is quiet in a way it never used to be. It is half past three on a Tuesday with the fryers going on downstairs and the whole afternoon still to get through.

And I am not going to hand you the comfortable sentences. I will not tell you that God arranged any of this, or that a reason exists which somebody could write on a card and post to you, or that there is a further-along version of yourself who is glad it happened. Those things get said kindly and they do real damage, and I am not putting one of them in your hand while you sit on the end of a bed.

Nor am I going to open the file on how you got here. You know the part that was yours better than any person alive, and I have no interest at all in reading it back to you. Mercy is not an audit, in either direction. That is not me being soft with you, it is what God says about His own memory in Isaiah 43, that He blots out and does not call the list to mind, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man believe that about himself while the coin is still in his hand.

You have not been written out of anything. The Shepherd in John 10 goes out after the one that is missing, and the whole shape of the story is that He goes where the sheep actually is rather than waiting at the gate for it to walk back tidy, and His Spirit is the one who has brought that to you this afternoon instead of leaving it a nice idea about somebody else.

What fullness looks like on a Tuesday

So what is it, if it is not the van and not the money.

It is the return of ordinary feeling. It is the afternoon a man notices he laughed at something on the radio and did not immediately check himself for it. It is prayer that does not have to open with a defense. It is sleep. It is wanting food. It is being in a room with people and staying in it. It is the small astonishing return of wanting anything at all, which is the first thing to go and very nearly the last to come back.

None of that is a consolation prize handed over because the real thing was unavailable. Read the verse once more. Life, and more of it, was the headline the entire time. Everything that went was scaffolding round a life, and the scaffolding came down in a way nobody would choose, and the terrible and merciful fact is that the life is still standing inside it.

You were loved on the worst Thursday of that March, at the hour it was actually happening, and not one degree less than you are loved this afternoon. That is not sentiment. Scripture puts it as love commended toward us while we were still in the wrong, in Romans 5, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence that size and gets it under the door of a rented room.

Nothing here is being sold to you

There is no catch in this and there is nothing to sign. Fullness of life is not something released to a person when they reach a standard, and no page of mine will ever suggest it is.

You are held right now, sitting exactly where you are sitting, and He is not waiting for you to be further along before He begins. The word of God says the Shepherd came so that His own would have life to the full, with no clause attached about the state they were in when He got there, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a fourteen month old wound while it is still open.