Life Was Always The Noun

Five past six on a Tuesday, and she is sitting in the chair by the front window with a mug going cold on the sill.

Two streets away, on the all weather pitch behind the leisure center, thirty girls are being shouted at by somebody else. She knows the drill they are doing because she wrote it. She knows which of them will be late, and which one will have forgotten her shin pads again, and which one will do the whole session with her socks round her ankles because she thinks it looks better that way.

The mesh bag is in the hall cupboard. Bibs, orange and yellow, washed. The pump with the needle taped to the side of it because the needle always goes missing. The whistle on its blue lanyard, hanging on the hook where she hung it in April, on the last night she stood on that pitch and did not know it was the last night.

Ten weeks. Ten weeks since the letter with the word in it, and the appointment where a kind man drew a picture on a bit of paper to explain what her own legs were doing. Ten weeks since she stopped being the woman who ran the girls' side and started being a woman in a chair by a window who used to.

The first fortnight the house was full. People came. Somebody put a lasagne in the freezer and somebody else strimmed the front. Her sister stayed four days. Now it is the tenth Tuesday and the phone does what a phone does at five past six, which is nothing.

Her friend rang on Sunday and meant every word of it. She said, God's going to give you abundance, love. Abundant life. It's in the Bible.

She said thank you, and she meant that too. And when she put the phone down she sat there thinking about that word, because abundance sounds like more, and everything about the last ten weeks has been less, and the only kind of more she can picture is the kind that comes in an envelope, which is not coming either.

Maybe that is where you are. Somebody handed you the beautiful word and you could not get it to touch the ground you are standing on. And if you came to a page with a name like this one hoping it meant something arriving, I am not going to make you small about that. Nobody who has lost something reaches for the sophisticated hope first.

Say what the word is not

Abundance is not money. It is not a windfall, it is not a check in the post, it is not the leisure center ringing to say the job is still there. I am not going to leave the word vague so that it does a little quiet work on a reader while she reads. And I am not going to smile at anybody who hoped it meant an envelope, because ten weeks in a chair by a window will make a person hope for the practical thing first, and that is not greed, it is arithmetic.

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 offered in that sentence. Abundantly is not a second parcel with contents of its own, it is a description of how much life: fullness of life, over the brim, more of it than there was, and not measured out against what a person managed to produce that week. So abundance in Scripture means fullness of life, and on this page it will never mean anything else.

You have that, and I am not saying it because it is the kind thing to say to a woman who cannot get up the stairs the way she did in March. It is in the sentence itself, written down in John 10 and spoken by the Shepherd about His own, and the Holy Spirit carries a definition that far into a ten week old grief, because a definition on its own would stop at the front door.

And it is not the body you had, either

This is the second thing to get out of the way, and it matters more here than anywhere. Nothing on this page promises her legs back. Nothing here says the diagnosis was sent, or allowed so that something could be learned from it, or that in a few years there will be gratitude for the letter that came in June. Those sentences get said, and they get said kindly, and they are not true, and I will not hand one to a woman with a mesh bag of bibs in her cupboard.

So hear the actual gift. You are inside the reach of a sentence that was never fitted to a body's capability in the first place. It was fitted to a person, and Scripture puts it in the hands of a Shepherd who goes to where the sheep actually is rather than waiting at the gate for her to walk back, and His Spirit does not require a working set of legs before He fills anybody standing on them or sitting near them.

Ten weeks is a specific length of time and it deserves naming rather than hurrying. Ten weeks is when the lasagne has been eaten and the dish has gone back and everybody who came has quite properly returned to their own lives, which is what people do and what they ought to do. Ten weeks is when the appointments settle into a rhythm and the shock wears off, and what is left underneath the shock turns out to be the actual grief, arriving late and with nobody left in the house to see it.

And in that exact room, at that exact hour, you have been met. Not visited later when the diary clears. The word of God puts Him near to the broken hearted in Psalm 34 and does not add a clause about mobility, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes nearness something a person feels in a chair by a window rather than something she reads about in a book.

What fullness actually looks like from a chair

So if it is not the money and not the pitch, what is it. It is the return of ordinary feeling. It is the afternoon a person notices she laughed at something on the radio. It is prayer that stops being a negotiation. It is being loved while producing nothing at all, which most of us never once experienced in thirty years of being useful and would not have chosen to learn this way. It is wanting company again. It is sleep. It is the small astonishing return of wanting anything.

None of that is a consolation prize handed over because the real thing was unavailable. Read the verse again and see which noun is the headline. You were made for life rather than for output, and the coaching and the whistle and the Tuesdays were scaffolding around a life, and when scaffolding comes down the merciful and appalling truth is that the life is still standing inside it. That is what is written in John 10, and the Holy Spirit is the one filling it now, at five past six, in a chair, with the bibs still in the bag.