They Brought The Doormat With Them

Saturday, about five, and he is standing in the hallway of the flat on the doormat they brought with them.

It is the same doormat. Coir, with a rubber edge and a worn patch off center where the old door used to catch it. When they packed, and it was a strange sort of packing because it had to be done in a fortnight, his wife put the doormat in a bin bag with the coats. He did not ask why. Two years later it is lying in front of a door that is not theirs, in a hallway that is not theirs, doing its job.

He can hear them in the other room. The girls and his wife, and something on the telly, and his wife has just laughed at it. Properly laughed, the way she does.

He has noticed that he did not.

That is the thing. He is not weeping in the car. He is not angry any more, and the anger was at least warm. What he is, two years on, is a man standing on a doormat listening to his own family being happy through a wall and finding that none of it reaches him.

And underneath it, running the way it runs every day at about this time, is the month. That month. He goes over it the way you go over a tooth. The letter, the week he waited, the conversation on the stairs, the day the second letter came. He does not need to think about it any more, because it thinks itself.

Two years is long enough that nobody mentions it. His brother mentioned it once at Christmas and the room went quiet, and nobody has since.

A woman at church said to him in the summer, with real warmth, that the joy of the Lord was going to be his strength. He said amen. He meant it as a manner of speaking, which is what amen has mostly become.

Maybe that is where you are. Not in the crisis. Standing in a hallway with everybody laughing through a wall, and a month running underneath the day, and nothing good getting in.

The word on the sign, and this is the article to say it hardest in

Abundance is not money. On this page of all pages that has to be flat and early, because the man in the hallway lost an address and the word on the door of this site sounds exactly like the thing he lost. It is not that. It is fullness of life, which is what the verse it comes from actually says, and there is no version of this where the word is quietly left open in case somebody reads an envelope into it.

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

Life is the noun and abundantly is the measure. Not a return to the old street, not a reversal, not a figure. Fullness of life, and that is the whole of what this site puts under the word.

And you have it two years on, standing on a doormat that came from somewhere else. Not when the feeling returns and not when the month stops running. Now, because it is written in John 10 that the Shepherd came for the life of His own, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence that far into a man who cannot feel anything at all.

Joy is poured, not produced

The second refusal is this one. Nobody on this page is going to ask him to work joy up. That is the standard offer and it is cruel by accident: it makes gladness one more thing a man has failed to provide for his family, which is precisely the wound he is standing in the hallway with.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.Psalm 16:11

Read where the joy is kept. In thy presence. Not in the circumstances, which is the reading everybody assumes and which would rule this man out entirely, and not in his own chest, which is where he has been rummaging for two years and finding nothing. It is located in a person, and the whole sentence is about proximity rather than about performance.

So this stands whatever this evening feels like. You are near to the One in whose presence the fulness is kept, and Psalm 16 puts the joy at His right hand rather than in anybody's capacity to summon it, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the pouring rather than the one who inspects a man to see whether he managed it.

And I am not going to promise the feeling. This is where a page like this one usually cheats. I cannot tell him when anything will register again, or that Saturday at five is going to start sounding different, and anybody who does is writing a forecast with somebody else's life in it. We flip the switch. He sends the current, in His own way and at His own hand, and I do not run the current.

The month that thinks itself

And I am not going to go through the month with him. Not the letter, not the week, not the conversation on the stairs. It has been gone through more times than anybody could count and there is nothing left in it, and a page that sat down and picked over it would only be doing out loud the thing that already runs underneath his afternoons.

What is true instead is this. You were loved on every single day of that month, including the week that gets rehearsed the most, and that is not my opinion, it is what is written about the God whose presence holds the fulness of joy in Psalm 16, and His Spirit is the one who can say it into a man at the exact hour the month is running.

Nothing here is a substitute

One more thing, and it matters. Gladness is not being offered in place of the house, and if it were offered that way it would deserve to be refused, because a swap is what everybody has been implying for two years and it is an insult dressed as comfort. You have both, in the honest sense: a real loss that is still a loss, and a real nearness that is not compensation for it, and Scripture holds those two in the same psalm without resolving one into the other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man carry both without pretending either of them away.