A Room With A Table In It

The fleece is on the back of the door in the hall and the watch is still pinned to it, upside down, the way you pin one when you are going to be reading it off your own chest forty times a shift.

It is still going. That is the daft part. He has not touched it and it has not stopped, and he can hear it if the house is quiet, which at four o'clock on a Wednesday it is.

Three months. The room had a table in it and a jug of water with three glasses and nobody drank any of it. Three people who were unfailingly polite. A woman took notes on a laptop and once, while he was talking, she looked up and he could not read her face at all. Twenty-two years took two days and then a letter that arrived on a Tuesday with his name spelled correctly.

He does not talk about what it was about. Not to his brother, not to the two people from the ward who still text, not here. That is his and he keeps it.

What he notices now is the shape of the week. He used to know where he would be in September. There was a rota on a fridge. There were long days and the drive home in the dark with the radio on and the tiredness that meant you had done something. Now there is a Wednesday afternoon that goes on for a very long time.

Somebody at his brother's house said, over a roast, that God has a plan and that this is going to open a door he cannot see yet. He said thanks. He passed the potatoes. And he thought, without any drama at all: I cannot see the door. I cannot see the corridor. I try to picture next year and there is nothing there, not a bad thing, not a frightening thing, nothing at all, like looking at a wall.

He stands in the hall now and he does not take the fleece down and he does not put it away, and he has stopped asking himself why.

Maybe that is where you are. Maybe people keep talking to you about a future as though the problem were that you are not looking forward to it. And maybe you would tell them, if there were a way to say it that did not frighten anybody, that it is not that the future looks bad. It is that when you look, there is nothing there.

The verse that refuses to describe it

There is a sentence in Paul that does the thing your situation actually needs, which is to say something enormous and then refuse to draw it.

Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.1 Corinthians 2:9

Look at what it does. It says prepared, which is past tense and finished. It says for those who love Him, which describes a relationship and not a performance. And then it says three times over that nobody has seen it, heard it, or got it into their head. Paul is not teasing. He is saying plainly that the contents are not available to your imagination, that this is normal, and that it is not a fault in the person looking.

So you are not failing at hope. Hear that properly, because I think you have been quietly assuming otherwise for three months. The written word says the thing has not entered into the heart of anybody, which means your blank wall is exactly what the verse describes, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding a future that was never given to you to hold.

And I am not going to describe it either

Which means I will not do the thing done to people in your position constantly. I will not tell you what is in it. I will not tell you when. I will not say the door is already open somewhere and you simply have not walked down the corridor yet, because I do not know that, and the moment I say it, it becomes a deadline you start missing.

And I will not tell you the hearing was for something. Not that heaven arranged the room with the table in it. Not that a purpose is folded into a letter that arrived on a Tuesday. Not that gratitude for it is waiting up ahead of you somewhere. Those sentences get offered constantly, every one of them is a lie, and a lie told warmly still breaks a person's trust in week five.

What I will say is that it is kept, and you are not the one keeping it. That is what 1 Corinthians 2 says out loud, that God has prepared, past tense, and that the preparing is His work rather than a project you are behind on, and it is His Spirit who has hold of it while you cannot see a thing.

What is actually available on a Wednesday

So if the future is off the table, and I have just taken it off on purpose, what is left.

Today is left, and I know how that sounds. But I am not offering you a slogan about living in the moment. I mean that the fullness in that verse is a present tense possession and it does not require a picture of anything.

You are held on a Wednesday afternoon that goes on too long. Not in September, not in a version of your life that has a shape. Here, in the hall, at four o'clock, and that is not my encouragement, it is what the Shepherd said He came for in John 10, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a person with nothing at all to show.

And what fullness looks like is smaller and better than a plan. It is feeling things again. It is prayer that is not a status update. It is wanting company. It is the drive somewhere with the radio on for no reason. It is sleeping. It is the small astonishing return of wanting anything at all.

You were not written off in that room. I am not going behind the panel, I am not reopening anything, and I am not telling you what was or was not fair. I am telling you that a finding about a registration never had jurisdiction over what God says about a person, and that is not a technicality, it is what is written right through Scripture, and His Spirit has not filed you anywhere.