Eleven Years In A Jar

The token is in a jam jar on the shelf above the bunk beds, in with his dad's cufflinks and two curtain hooks, and he has not moved it in eight weeks.

Eleven years on the front of it. He can see the edge of it from where he is sitting, which is the bottom bunk, which has a duvet cover with dinosaurs on it, and his feet are on the floor and his hands are hanging between his knees, and it is twenty past two on a Tuesday.

His sister's spare room. There is a clothes airer by the radiator with his three shirts on it. There is a carrier bag by the door he has not unpacked, because unpacking is a decision. Downstairs the washing machine is doing the fast bit and the house is shaking very slightly, and the kids come in at half three and they are polite to him now, which is the part that gets him. They used to shout when he came through the door.

Eight weeks. He knows what it cost, because it is not a mystery and nobody has had to explain it to him. The job went first and quickly. The flat went with the job. And the other thing, the thing with no paperwork, is the way his sister's voice goes careful on the phone now, and the way his brother-in-law is kind in a very managed way, like a man being kind to something that might go off.

Somebody from the old crowd messaged on Sunday. God is going to grow something beautiful out of this, mate. Watch what He does with it.

He read it four times and put the phone face down on the dinosaurs.

Because here is what he actually thinks, sitting on a child's bunk at twenty past two: people keep telling him it will all come back, and he does not believe that, and more than that, he does not think he has the standing to want it. He is not looking at scorched ground that happened to him. He set it alight himself, on purpose, over about nine days, and he can remember most of them.

Maybe that is where you are. Maybe somebody has told you something will grow here, and you have looked at the ground and thought: not this ground. Not after what I did to it.

What Isaiah says, and what he does not

The oaks come out of one verse and everybody quotes half of it, so let us look at all of it.

To console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.Isaiah 61:3

Read what it does and does not do. It says planting. It says the planting is the Lord's and the glory is His. It does not say when. It does not say what the tree looks like, or that it stands where the old thing stood, or that anybody watching will recognize it. Isaiah refuses to describe it, and that refusal is not a gap in the text. It is mercy, because a description would have become a deadline inside a week.

So you are not owed a forecast by me and you are not getting one. What you have is the planting named as His work rather than yours, which is exactly what the written word says and exactly where it stops, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a refusal like that feel like kindness rather than a door shutting.

What I will not tell you it was for

The message on Sunday was meant well. Watch what He does with it is a sentence people reach for because standing beside a man on a bunk bed with nothing to say is very hard and almost nobody can do it.

But I am not building you a floor out of it. I will not tell you the nine days were arranged. I will not tell you a design was running underneath them. I will not tell you that what grows will be bigger than eleven years, because I do not know that, nobody does, and the person who says it has quietly turned a promise about God into a prediction about you.

Here is what I will say instead, and it is smaller and it is solid. You are loved on burnt ground, today, by a God who is called the planter in that verse rather than the inspector. That is what Isaiah 61 puts on the page and I have not added to it, and His Spirit is the one who has kept you praying across eight weeks you would not call praying.

The thing that is already up

There is a habit of looking for the oak, and the oak is not the assignment today. Something is already alive in your life and it is small enough to have been walked past about forty times.

It is not impressive, and I am not going to inflate it for you. It might be that you got up. It might be that you rang your sister back. It might be that you have started hearing the washing machine again, which means you are in the room and not somewhere behind your own eyes. Small living things are exactly what Isaiah 61 means when it calls the planting the Lord's, and the Holy Spirit is the one who points at them, because on your own you walk straight past.

And I am not calling that a substitute. It is not a substitute for eleven years and it is not a substitute for the flat. It is a sign of life in ground that is still black, and both of those get to be true on the same Tuesday.

You are not standing outside this because of what you did over nine days. That is the sentence I want you to hear more than any other here. Isaiah is written to people in Zion who are mourning rather than to people who kept it together, and the Holy Spirit does not check the cause of a ruin before He starts planting on it.