The Size On The Label

She is looking for a tape measure and that is the only reason the drawer is open.

The bottom drawer of the spare room chest. Wrapping paper, the button tin, the spare batteries. She moves the paper aside and there it is, folded the way she folded it, in a freezer bag because of the moths.

Lemon yellow. Moss stitch on the yoke because she wanted it to look like something. Little wooden buttons that she went into town specially for. She can remember doing the second sleeve in front of the darts on a Thursday.

Six to nine months, it says on the label she wrote out herself in biro and safety pinned to the front.

He is two and a half now. She knows that the way you know things nobody tells you: a date on a calendar she does not write on any more.

Three weeks ago there was a message. Not a row. A row would almost have been easier, because a row has a middle and an end. It was four lines long and very calm and it used the word space, and she has read it enough times that she could say it with the phone face down on the table.

Three weeks is nothing. Three weeks is still the part where you check the phone before you have properly woken up. It is still the part where you rehearse what you would say if a car pulled up outside, and you have got quite good at the first bit and you have never once got past the second.

Her friend came round on Sunday and stood in the doorway with her coat on and said, kindly, meaning every word: they come round in the end, love. Blood is blood.

She said yes. She made her a cup of tea. She washed the cup up afterwards and stood at the sink far longer than the cup needed.

And here is the part she does not say to anybody. She can trace it. She can sit down with a cup of tea and walk the whole thing backwards, year by year, and she can see where her own hands are on it. Not all of it. But her hands are on it, and she knows exactly where, and there is nobody she can say that to without them rushing in to tell her it was not her fault, which is kind, and which is not what she is asking for.

Maybe that is where you are. Holding something small and finished in your hands, in a size that has already gone by, in a house where the phone no longer does what it used to do.

The word on the front, and what it is not

Abundance is not money. It is not a reversal and it is not a clever way of getting somebody to ring you. Jesus said He came so that people would have life and have it abundantly, John 10 verse 10, and the noun in that sentence is life, while abundantly is a description of how much life. So the word means fullness of life, and there is no second meaning underneath it that I am keeping back for later.

And the first thing that is full about your life this afternoon is that you are loved inside it. Not loved once it is untangled. Not loved on the far side of an apology that nobody has accepted yet. Lamentations 3 says His mercies are new every morning and His compassions do not fail, and the man who wrote that was sitting in a city he had watched fall. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes new every morning land in a woman standing at an open drawer.

New every morning is a strange phrase until you notice what it is doing. It is not saying yesterday's mercy is used up. It is saying today's has not been affected by yesterday at all. That is the scandal of the sentence, and it is why it sits in a book of grief rather than in a greetings card.

So today's mercy has already arrived and it did not consult the file first. You have it before you have said anything and before anybody has rung, which is not how mercy behaves anywhere else in the world you live in. That is written into the middle of a lament rather than into a greetings card, which is exactly where a person in your position needs it to be, and the Spirit carries it into the actual room.

The part that was yours

I am not going to list it. Not because it does not exist, and not because kindness requires pretending. I am not going to list it because the list is already yours, and it has been walked more times than anybody knows, and reading it back to you in somebody else's handwriting would not do one thing that mercy does.

And I am not going to take it off you either, because a mercy that needs the truth shrunk first is not mercy, it is management. Here is what is actually the case: you are met with a kindness that is not conditional on how this started. Scripture says His compassions do not fail and that He knows what we are made of, and it is the Holy Spirit who says that to a person rather than about them.

There is a thing people do with guilt, which is to try to get it weighed. If somebody would only tell me how much of this was mine, I could pay that much and be done with it. It does not work and it never has, and the whole gospel is arranged around it not working: a debt that can be weighed is a debt somebody could pay, and this one was carried instead.

So the weighing is not happening, and you were never going to be asked to finish it before being loved. Scripture says that while we were still in the middle of the mess of it, Christ died for us, which puts the loving before the sorting rather than after it, and His Spirit is the one who applies that to a particular Thursday rather than to humanity in general.

What you can actually hand over

There is one move available this afternoon, and it is small, and it is not a technique for getting anybody to ring. It is this: name the part that was yours, out loud, without the sentence that softens it, and then give it to Him in one sentence, and stop.

That is not a confession you have to complete correctly. You have already been carried, and the carrying started a long time before you got the words into the right order. Scripture says He bore what was ours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence said out loud at a chest of drawers and puts it where it belongs.

And nothing here is a lever. I am not handing you a way to make a phone ring, and I would not do that to you, because a technique dressed as a promise is the cruellest thing anybody could put in your hands this week. This is about what is true in the room you are standing in, with the drawer open, this afternoon.