The Roll Of Shears In The Cupboard

She only wanted a towel.

The airing cupboard is where the towels are, and the roll is on the shelf above them, and it has been there since the middle of March. Brown leather, softened at the fold, tied with a lace because the buckle went years ago. Six pairs inside it, each in its own slot. Her mother bought her the first three when she finished her training and she has never once put them in a drawer.

Thirty one years. Her own chair by the second window because the light there was good until about four. The regulars who booked the same slot for a decade and told her things they did not tell their families. The tin of hairgrips. The radio that was always on and never listened to.

The hands went in October and it took until March to have a name for it, and by then it did not matter much what it was called. There is no grip. There is no fine steadiness. There is a tremor she cannot predict and cannot hide, and there is a morning she tried, properly tried, on her own hair, and had to stop.

Five months.

The salon covered her clients at first, which was kind, and then her clients settled with somebody else, which they had to do, and that is a small ordinary sentence that goes through a person like a nail. Nobody did anything wrong. That is the thing about five months. There is nobody to be angry with and no letter to answer and nothing on fire, and the frightening part is over and everyone has gone back to their own lives, which is exactly what they should do.

Her sister in law said, the last time she came, that God does not waste anything. She said it kindly. She meant it as a gift. It landed on the kitchen counter like a plate somebody had put down too hard.

So she is standing at the airing cupboard at ten past four in the afternoon with the warm smell of the tank coming out at her, and she has a towel in her left hand, and she is looking at the roll on the shelf above the towels, and she has been looking at it for a while now.

She does not cry. She has done a lot of that and today it is not there. She just stands.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Not in the crisis. After it. In the ordinary bit that goes on and on and that nobody thinks to ask about any more, holding a towel, looking at the thing you used to be.

Let me say what the word is not, before anything is offered under it

There is a word over this page and I want to take it out of your hands and turn it over before anything at all is handed to you underneath it.

Abundance is not money, and on this page it is not a working pair of hands either. It is not the chair back, not the diary back, not thirty one years given to you again in better condition. Abundance means fullness of life, and that is the entire content of it, and I am not going to leave the word pleasantly vague so it does a little quiet work on you while you read.

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

Read what the noun is. Life. Abundantly is not a separate parcel with items in it; it is a measure of how much life. And a woman standing at an airing cupboard with a towel in her hand at ten past four is inside that sentence exactly as she is, with the roll on the shelf and nothing whatsoever changed about it.

You have that fullness in the hands you have actually got, and that is not my kindness talking. It is what is written in John 10, spoken by a Shepherd about His own sheep, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a five month old grief without first asking the grief to be over.

Five months is its own country

Nothing I have just said opens the roll or gives back the second window, and I am not going to move you off that.

Five months is a particular distance and it has its own weather. At two weeks there were messages and flowers. At five months there is nothing in the porch, not because anybody stopped loving you but because five months is not news, and other people's lives are loud, and a life closes over a gap the way water does. The people who once asked how things were now ask how things are, which is a different question, and the difference is audible.

You were not left when the messages thinned out. Psalm 34 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves such as are of a contrite spirit, and near is a position rather than a mood, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding a person in that position whether or not the person can feel a thing about it.

And I want to stay in the cupboard doorway a while longer, because a page that hurries out of it has not understood what a body is. She did not have a job. She had a way of being in a room. There is a whole grammar in a trade like that: the weight of a head in your palm, the sound scissors make when they are right, the two seconds before somebody tells you the real reason they came in. That does not live on a certificate. It lived in her hands, and the hands are what went.

You are not being asked to be further along than you are. Scripture puts the Lord beside crushed people rather than out in front of them beckoning, and the Spirit of God is named a Comforter rather than a timetable, and there is nothing in either of those waiting for you to improve before it applies.

What is actually here, in the doorway

So what is on offer, if it is not the hands and not the diary.

Company. It sounds thin written down and it is not thin at all after a few hundred hours in a room with a thing nobody mentions any more. It means being loved while producing nothing, which most people have never once experienced and would not have chosen to learn this way. It means somebody present who is not managing you, not fixing the sentence you just said, not steering you gently towards the encouraging part. It means being allowed to say the true thing out loud without watching the other face change.

You have been met here, and met is not the same as moved on. That is the plain sense of Psalm 34 and it is not a nicer reading of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it true in a body rather than in a paragraph, and He has never set a limit on how long a person may stand in a doorway.

Nothing about the roll has changed while you read this. I am not going to pretend otherwise. And I am not going to tell you the five months were for something, because they were not for something. They were five months. He was in every one of them. Both of those are true at once and neither cancels the other, and you do not have to hold them in any particular order.