The Shop Still Smells Of It

The scoop is still lying in the cumin. Five weeks, and he has not been able to make himself pick it out.

It is a brass one, worn pale on the handle, and it went into every sack in that shop for nineteen years. On the last afternoon he washed the scales, wrapped the weights in newspaper, boxed the tea tins, then came to the cumin at the back and simply stopped, and left the scoop where it was.

Today is a Tuesday and he has come in to sweep, which is the strange part, because there is nothing left to sweep for. The landlord's man wants the keys on Thursday. But the broom is here and his hands know this floor, so he sweeps around the crates of figs that went soft, the reel of paper bags nobody will ever fill, and the shelf where the honey stood in three sizes.

The smell has got into the wood. That is the thing nobody warns you about. Cardamom and dried mint and the sweetness off the date boxes, all of it in the shelving, and it will still be there when somebody else is selling something else in here.

The staff have all found something. The boy who stacked is on nights at a warehouse, and the woman who did the counter on Saturdays sends a message every week or so, and he has stopped knowing what to write back.

Around four the woman from the launderette two doors down puts her head in, because the shutter was up and she saw the light on. She looks at the empty middle of the room, and she says, and she means every word of it kindly, that she has been praying for him, and that God is going to give him abundance, more than he ever had in here.

He says thank you. He means that too. He watches her go back along the pavement in her cardigan and he stands there with the broom and thinks: that word again. Every person who says it to me thinks it means money, and I have none of that either, and I am not sure I know what else it could possibly mean.

Maybe that is where you are. Somebody handed you a beautiful sentence about beauty for ashes and you could not get it to reach the floor under you. And if you came to a page with this name over it half hoping the word meant a check, I am not going to make you feel small for that. Nobody in a ruin reaches for the sophisticated thing first.

Let me take the word off you first

I want to do the plain thing immediately, before I offer you anything at all, so that nothing further down this page is quietly selling you something.

Abundance is not money. Not here, not in the verse the word comes from, and not on a site with this name over the door. It is fullness of life. Not a rebuild, not a bigger unit on a better road, not those shelves filled again. I am not going to leave the word conveniently vague so that it does a little work on you while you read.

Here is the sentence it actually lives in.

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

Look at the noun. Life. That is the thing being handed over. Abundantly is not a second parcel with goods in it, it is a description of how much life: over the brim, more of it than there was, and not measured against what anybody managed to hold on to.

You have that, and I am not saying it because it is the warm thing to say here. It is written in John 10, said by the Shepherd about His own, and the Holy Spirit takes a sentence that old and gets it inside a man who has been sweeping an empty room for five weeks.

Back to the Tuesday, because the word does not fill the shop

Nothing I have just written puts stock back on those shelves or gives you the nineteen years.

I want to stay in the room a moment, because a page that hurries out has not understood what five weeks is. Five weeks is after the phone calls stop. It is when the fear has burned down and left this flat, wide quiet, and everyone who was kind at the time has gone back to their own lives, correctly, because they have lives. It is a Tuesday afternoon with a broom in your hands and nowhere in the world that expects you.

And I will not tell you there was a reason underneath it. I will not tell you it was arranged, or that thankfulness for it is coming, or that whatever follows was worth losing this for. Those sentences get handed to people in ruins all the time, they are not true, and I am not going to put one in your hands on a Tuesday like this one.

What I will tell you is that you are not outside anything. The fullness in that verse was never sized to your circumstances, it was sized to you, and Scripture puts it in the hands of a Shepherd who goes to where the sheep actually is rather than where it ought to have been by now, and His Spirit does not wait for a life to be tidy before He fills it.

What fullness looks like in a room with nothing in it

So if it is not the shop and not the money, what is actually being given.

It is the return of ordinary feeling. It is the afternoon somebody catches themselves laughing at something small and it does not turn to ash in the mouth. It is being loved while producing nothing, which most of us have never once tested. It is prayer that has stopped being a negotiation. It is sleep. It is the small astonishing return of wanting anything.

None of it is a consolation prize wheeled out because the real thing is unavailable. Life, and more of it, was always the headline, and everything else was scaffolding built around a life. The scaffolding came down. The terrible and merciful truth is that the life is still standing inside it, and God is filling that.

You were loved through every one of those five weeks, including the days you told nobody about, and that is not my opinion of you. It is what the word says about how God holds His own, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a man with a broom rather than into a theory.

The trade was never only the trade

There is something particular about losing a shop, and it is not mainly about the money.

A grocery is a piece of hospitality. It is nineteen years of the same doorway, tea made in the back, somebody's son doing his homework on a crate because his mother was working late. When the shutter comes down all of that goes with it, and there is no good word for the grief of losing people you saw every day and never once called friends.

Here is what I want to put in your hands about that. The hospitality was never the shop's. It came out of you, through a doorway, for nineteen years, and the doorway has gone and the thing that was pouring through it has not.

You are the same person God made when He made you hospitable, and that is not sentiment. It is written into the way Scripture speaks about gifts and callings, that He does not take them back, and the Holy Spirit did not withdraw a single one of them on the afternoon the landlord's man asked for the keys.

So say the word, and then say what it means, because a word left vague keeps its old meaning. You have been given fullness of life in the exact room you are standing in, with the broom in your hand and the scoop still in the cumin, and that is John 10 rather than my encouragement, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings a sentence that old all the way down to a Tuesday.