Two Suitcases In The Hall

The form is on his sister's kitchen table and the pen is hers, and the box he has been looking at for eleven minutes is the one that says previous address.

He knows the street. He could walk it with his eyes shut. The bakery on the corner that opened at five. The tram that came up the hill and made the window frame rattle. Twenty two years of it. He learned the language properly, not the shopping version, the version where you can argue and be funny and comfort somebody at a funeral.

Then the firm went, and the flat went with the job because the flat had come with the job, and there was a fortnight of phone calls and then an airport, and then this kitchen.

Four years ago. Four years, and the two suitcases are still in the hall.

That is the part nobody warns you about. Not the collapse. The afterwards. His sister moved the coats along to make room for them and never mentioned it again, and now the cases have a place the way a sideboard has a place. He has not unpacked them properly because unpacking them properly is a sentence he has not agreed to say yet.

He is fifty three. The language he spent twenty two years getting right is worth nothing at all to anybody on this street. He still thinks in it. He counts in it. When he cannot sleep he says the names of the stops on that tram line, all of them, in order, and then lies there in the dark feeling foolish.

His sister comes through for the kettle and sees the form and says, gently, because she loves him and she is trying: this is the year it turns round for you, I can feel it. God has got abundance waiting for you, you watch.

He says thanks and puts the cap back on her pen.

She goes through to the front room and he sits there with the box that says previous address and thinks: that word again. Every single time somebody says that word to me, what I hear is a figure, and I have none of that either, and I do not even have the country any more.

Maybe that is roughly where you are sitting. Somebody handed you a beautiful line and it went straight over the top of the actual room. And if you came to a page with a name like this one half hoping the word meant something arriving in an envelope, I am not going to make you feel small about it, because nobody who has lost a whole life reaches for the sophisticated hope first.

Let me take the word off the sign and turn it over

I want to do the plain thing straight away, before anything at all is offered to you underneath it.

Abundance is not money. Not on this page, not in the sentence the word comes out of. It is not the flat back, not the firm back, not the country back, and it is not an envelope arriving to make four years look like a detour. I am not going to leave the word conveniently vague so it does a little quiet 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 what the noun is. Life. That is the thing being handed over. Abundantly is not a second parcel with contents of its own; it is a description of how much life. Over the brim. More of it than there was. Not measured out with a small cup, and not in proportion to how well anybody has coped. So abundance means fullness of life, and that is the whole definition, and it is the only one this site will ever put in your hands.

You have that fullness in the kitchen you are actually sitting in, and I am not saying it because it is the kind thing to say to a man with a form in front of him. It is in the sentence, written down in John 10 and spoken by the Shepherd about His own, and the Holy Spirit carries a line like that across four years and two suitcases and sets it down somewhere it can be received.

Why the hall is the honest place to say it

Nothing I have just told you unpacks the cases or gives back the twenty two years.

Four years is a particular distance and it has its own weather. At six weeks people bring food. At four years nobody brings anything, because four years is not a crisis, it is a situation, and situations do not get casseroles. The people who rang every night rang weekly, then rang at Christmas, then rang when something happened to somebody else. Nobody did anything wrong. Lives are loud and they close over a gap the way water does.

You were not left behind when the phone calls thinned out. The Shepherd in John 10 is described going after the one, and the going is His own idea rather than a response to how well the one was managing, and His Spirit has never once required a tidy hall before filling the person standing in it.

And I want to say something about the language, because that is the loss inside the loss and almost nobody names it. A tongue you learned as an adult and got all the way right is not a skill. It is a shape your mind took. It is jokes that only work one way round. It is the ability to be gentle with somebody at a graveside. Losing the use of it is not like losing a certificate. It is closer to losing a room you used to be able to walk into.

You are known in that language too. Scripture puts the wonders of God in the ears of a whole crowd in Acts 2, each in the tongue they were born to, and not one of those tongues was a second best arrangement, and it was the Holy Spirit who did that in the first place and He has not developed a preference since.

What fullness looks like at somebody else's table

So what does it actually amount to, if it is not the flat and not the figure.

It means being able to feel things again. It means ordinary tenderness coming back, the afternoon you notice you laughed at something small. 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 prayer that has stopped being a negotiation. It means wanting to be in a room with people. It means sleeping. It means the small astonishing return of wanting anything at all.

You have not been handed a consolation prize because the real item was out of stock. Read the sentence again: life was always the headline. Everything that went was scaffolding around a life, and the scaffolding came down, and the appalling and merciful truth written into John 10 is that the life is still there underneath it, and the Holy Spirit is the one filling it, at a kitchen table, on an ordinary afternoon, in a house that is not yours.

None of that is the twenty two years back. I am not going to pretend it is, and I am not going to tell you the collapse was arranged for your benefit, because that is the comfortable sentence and it is a lie, and I will not put one of those in your hand while somebody else's pen is in it.