The Pencil And The Rented Door Frame

Her daughter stands with her heels against the kitchen door frame and says, stand up straight, mum, do it properly, and holds her hand flat on the top of her own head the way she always has.

There is a pencil in the drawer here. It is not their drawer. It is a rental and the drawer has somebody else's bottle opener in it and a takeaway menu for a place two streets from where they used to live.

She takes the pencil. She puts it against the girl's hand and makes the line and writes the date beside it, small, the way she has done since the child could stand.

And then they both look at it. One line, on its own, near the top of a door frame in a house that is not theirs.

Ten months ago the fire went through the back of the house and up. The report said the wiring in the extension. They were out. That is the sentence everybody says first and it is the right sentence and she has said it a hundred times: we were all out, nobody was hurt, that is what matters. It is true. It does not do the thing people want it to do.

What went: her father's tools, which were in the cupboard under the stairs, and which she had not used and would have given to her son. The letters, in a shoe box, from her mother, in her mother's handwriting, which is a thing that no longer exists anywhere in the world now. And the door frame in the old kitchen with fourteen years of marks on it and the dates written next to them in three different pens.

Insurance is not a comfort. Insurance is a process, and a woman called Deborah who rings on Thursdays and uses the word schedule.

Ten months. The neighbors were extraordinary at the time and they were extraordinary for about six weeks and now they wave. School has stopped asking. Her son has stopped mentioning it, which she does not think is the same as being finished with it.

People still say things. The one she gets most is that God will give it all back, restored, better, and they say it with real warmth and they are quoting something and she does not think it is true.

So she is standing in a rented kitchen at half past five with a pencil in her hand, looking at one line and one date with nothing underneath it.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Somebody keeps promising you a copy of what you lost, and you have stopped being able to nod at it.

First, what the word over this page is not

I want to deal with the word before anything is offered to you under it, because enough sentences have been aimed at you this year.

Abundance is not money and it is not the inventory back. It is not the tools, not the letters, not fourteen years of marks reappearing on a door frame in better handwriting. Abundance means fullness of life, and that is the whole of the definition, and it is the only one you will get here.

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

The noun is life. Not contents. Not a schedule. Abundantly describes how much life, and it says nothing at all about matching what was there before, and I would rather you heard that from me plainly than worked it out later and felt handled.

You have that fullness already, in a rented kitchen at half past five, and I am not saying it as a kindness to a woman holding a pencil. It is what is written in John 10, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a house that smells faintly of somebody else, which is further than a sentence usually gets.

The verse says oaks, and it does not say copies

Here is the line everybody is quoting at you, and I want to read it exactly as it stands.

To give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord.Isaiah 61:3

Read what it actually says and read what it does not. It says beauty for ashes. It says oil for mourning. It says a garment for heaviness. It says trees, oaks in the older word, and it calls them the planting of the Lord.

It does not say the new thing looks like the old thing. It does not say an oak is a replacement shoe box. An oak is not a version of anything that burned. It is its own thing entirely, and it grows at the speed an oak grows, which is not a speed anybody enjoys, and Isaiah does not attach a single date to any of it.

So I will not either. I am not going to tell you what is going to grow, or when, or how it will compare. Anyone who does that has left the verse behind and started making things up, and there has been enough of that this year for anybody to smell it.

You are the planting of the Lord and not the leftovers of a fire, and that is written in Isaiah 61 and not a compliment I invented. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a phrase like that land in a woman who has been describing herself as somebody who is coping.

Something is already up, and it is small

Now here is the part that is worth standing still for.

Growth on burnt ground does not announce itself. It is not an event and there is no morning it arrives. It is small, green, unimpressive and easy to walk past, and by the time anybody notices it, it has been there a while.

So look at the actual ten months. Your daughter still asks to be measured. That is not nothing. That is a child who has decided this house counts enough to have a line in it. Your son goes quiet about it, and he sits in the same room as you to be quiet, which is a decision he makes daily. There is a pencil in a drawer that is not yours and you used it anyway. Somebody rang last week and you answered.

You have things growing in you that you would be embarrassed to name out loud, and small is not the same as insignificant. Scripture is unembarrassed about mustard seeds and green shoots and the day of small things, and it is the Holy Spirit who grows what nobody photographs, and He has never needed a thing to be impressive before He gave it life.

And I want to be careful here, because growth is often used to close a grief and I am not doing that. The letters are gone. That is a real, permanent, unrepaired loss and naming a green shoot does not settle it and is not supposed to. Both things stand in the room together. Something is growing, and something is gone, and you do not have to make them agree.

You have not been asked to be glad about the fire, not now and not later, and nothing written in Isaiah 61 requires it of you. The Holy Spirit is not waiting behind that door for you to produce a better attitude before He plants anything.