The Suitcases In The Hall

The cases are still in the hall and they are still zipped.

Two of them, one hard and one soft, standing against the radiator where she put them down ten weeks ago. Her sister walks round them every morning and has stopped mentioning it. She walks round them too. Unpacking is not a job, it is a sentence, and she is not ready to say it.

It is a Wednesday, about half four, and she is sitting on the edge of the bed in the box room with her coat still on because the room is cold and it is not hers to fiddle with the heating. Downstairs the front door goes and the children come in and the kettle starts, and all of it is warm and kind and belongs to somebody else.

Twenty-two years she had over there. A flat with a balcony you could get two chairs on. The agency she built with a partner, slowly, out of nothing, and the little bell over the door of it. A greengrocer who knew what she wanted before she said it. A language she got so far inside that she dreamed in it, and it is worth precisely nothing to her in this town, on this street, at half past four on a Wednesday.

In her coat pocket, still, are the keys to the flat. She knows they open nothing. She has taken them out of the pocket twice and put them back in.

Somebody at her sister's church said last Sunday, well, you are home now, in the warmest voice, meaning nothing but good by it. She said yes. She got in the car and sat with her hands on the wheel in the car park for a while before she started it, because home was the word she had used for the balcony, and she has not got a word left for this.

And the strangest part is that the emergency is over. The phone calls with the awful voices have stopped. Nothing is on fire. Everybody has quite properly gone back to their own lives, and what is left is a box room, a coat that will not come off, and a life that is simply not there any more.

Maybe that is about where you are. Somebody read you a beautiful line about beauty for ashes and you could not get it down to the floor you were standing on. And if you came to a page with this name over the door half hoping the second word meant something practical, I am not going to make you feel foolish. Nobody in a ruin reaches for the sophisticated thing first.

The word over the door

Abundance does not mean a wage, a flat with your own key in it, or a life that looks like the one you left behind. In the book it comes from, the word is a measure of life and nothing else. Fullness of life, and never money. That is the definition, and it is the only one this site will ever hand you.

I say that plainly because the name of this place sounds like a promise about your circumstances and it is not one. What is full here is a life, in the sense of the Shepherd's own sentence in John 10, and the noun in that sentence is life rather than possessions.

And I am not going to use it to move you along. This is the part of the site where nothing lifts.

You are met here, on the edge of a bed in a cold box room with your coat on, which is a different thing from being cheered up. Scripture says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted, in Psalm 34, and near is not a figure of speech He uses loosely, and the Holy Spirit makes nearness something a person can feel the weight of rather than a phrase somebody printed on a card.

Ten weeks is a particular distance

Ten weeks is not the crisis and it is not afterwards. It is the bit with no name.

At ten weeks the casseroles have stopped. The people who rang every night now ring on a Sunday, and they are not wrong to, because they have their own children and their own kettles. By ten weeks a person has told the story enough times to have a short version, and you hate the short version, because it has all the years taken out of it.

Nobody means any harm. The woman who said it meant it as a blessing. It landed like a door closing on twenty-two years, and both of those things are true at once, and holding them at once is allowed.

I will not tell you that God arranged this so that something could come of it. I will not tell you there is a reason somebody could write out for you, and I will not tell you a further-along version of you is grateful. Those sentences are said gently and they land like a boot, and I am not putting one in your hands while the cases are still in the hall.

You have not been mislaid. The word of God has Him seeking, going out, coming down, standing at the door, going after the one that is missing rather than filing it under lost, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that out of the general and puts it in a box room where a woman is sitting in her coat.

Nobody is moving you on

There is a particular loneliness in being rushed, and church can be very good at it without meaning to be. Somebody wants you further along by Sunday because your sadness is hard to sit beside. That is a human thing and I do not condemn it. It is also not what God is doing with you.

He has never once required the ground to be tidy before He arrived on it. He came to a widow at a gate, to a man among the tombs, to two of them walking in the wrong direction to Emmaus, and in not one of those does He open with a plan for the rebuild.

You were not left over there and you were not lost on the way back. That is not my kindness, it is written into the shape of a hundred pages of Scripture where God finds people in the middle of the worst week of their lives, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a room with a radiator and two suitcases against it.

What is actually being given

So what is fullness of life on a Wednesday afternoon in a box room, if it is not a flat and not a wage.

It is God with you in it. Not God waiting at the far end of it for you to arrive in better condition. Fullness begins as presence, because there is no version of a full life that is not first a life with Him in it, and everything else people mean by the word is downstream of that.

You have Him here, in the cold room, with the coat on, at half past four, and nothing about you has to improve for that sentence to stay true. Scripture puts Him near to the brokenhearted and saving such as are of a contrite spirit, and His Spirit is the one who brings that off the page and into the actual room you are sitting in.