Paragraph Forty One

The wallet is one of those plastic ones with a press stud, and the document inside it has a staple that has gone rusty at the corner.

It lives in a box under the stairs, behind the Christmas things and a bag of cables nobody will ever use. He knows exactly where it is in the box. He knows how far down. Thursday afternoon, and the house is empty until five, and he has got it out again and he is sitting at the kitchen table with it in front of him.

Paragraph forty one. That is the one. He has read it so many times that he can say it without looking, and he looks anyway, every time, in case it says something different.

Twenty years he did that job. He was good at it, and that is not vanity, it is simply true, and he has stopped being able to say it out loud because it sounds like a defense. There were people who asked for him by name. There was a colleague who used to come and stand in his doorway at the end of a shift and think out loud at him.

The room where it ended had a table in it, and a jug of water with a lid, and a woman taking a note at the side. He remembers that the carpet was blue. He remembers the sound the chair made. There was a lunch break, in the middle of it, and he ate a sandwich in a corridor.

Four years now. That is the part nobody warns you about. At four years there is no crisis to attend to and no sympathy going, because everybody has quite rightly got on with it. His wife has stopped asking whether he has got the wallet out. The colleague who used to stand in his doorway sends a message at Christmas.

Somebody at church said a while back, well, God has forgiven you, so you should put it down. Kindly. Genuinely. He said thanks, and he went home, and he got it out of the box that same evening and read paragraph forty one twice, because you cannot put down a thing by being told to.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Somebody handed you a beautiful line about beauty for ashes and you could not make it land, because the ashes have your own fingerprints on them and everybody keeps politely not mentioning it.

Say what the word means first

Abundance is not money and it is not a career handed back. It is not the registration, it is not the room with the blue carpet running the other way, and it is not a sum of any kind. It is fullness of life, which is what the Shepherd meant in John 10 when He said He came so that people would have life and have it to the full.

That is the whole definition and it is the only one this page will offer you. If you came here hoping the second word in the name meant something practical, I am not going to be clever about that. Nobody standing in a ruin reaches for the sophisticated thing first.

Now. The rest of this is about mercy, and there is a way of doing mercy that is really an audit with a kind voice, and I am not going to do that to you.

You are loved this afternoon with the wallet open on the table in front of you. Not loved once the wallet is back in the box. Isaiah 43 has God saying that He is the one who blots out and does not call the list to mind, He says it about His own memory rather than about your progress, and the Holy Spirit gets a sentence like that past a man's guard while he is sitting there reading paragraph forty one.

I am not opening the file, in either direction

Here is what this page will not do. It will not itemize your share of it. It will not tell you which paragraph was fair and which was not, it will not reconstruct the hearing with better lighting, and it will not decide for you what you did.

And it will not do the other thing either, which is to sweep it. I am not going to tell you that none of it was yours when some of it may well have been. You would not believe me, and you would be right not to, and a mercy that needs the facts altered first is not mercy, it is flattery, and flattery has never yet held anybody up.

You know your own part better than any person alive. God knows it better than you do. Between those two there is nothing left for me to establish, and I am not going to stand a man in a second hearing on a Thursday afternoon in his own kitchen.

You have mercy without an account being asked for. That is not a soft reading, it is the pattern all through Scripture, where God is repeatedly slow to anger and plenteous in kindness before a word of explanation has been offered to Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in a man who has spent four years rehearsing his explanation.

Four years is a long time to hold a document

At four years the thing has changed shape. It is not an event any more, it is furniture.

And the strange cruelty of four years is that everybody else has finished with it, which is right, and so there is nowhere to put it. The sympathy went years ago. The questions stopped. What is left is a man, a box under the stairs, and a Thursday afternoon.

I will not tell you that the collapse was arranged in order to teach you something. I will not tell you a reason exists which somebody could write on a card for you, and I will not tell you that a further-along version of you is grateful for the room with the blue carpet. Those sentences get said warmly and they do real harm, and I am not putting one in your hands while the wallet is open.

You have not been on trial for four years, whatever the box under the stairs has felt like. Isaiah 43 has God saying that He blots out and does not call the list to mind, which is a matter closed on His side rather than a hearing still running on yours, and His Spirit is the one who gets a sentence like that through to a man on a Thursday afternoon.

What God is actually doing

He is not holding it over you. That is the whole of it, and it is enormous.

There is a way people talk about forgiveness that leaves God slightly cool with you afterwards, as though the matter were settled but the friendship never quite recovered. That is not the God of the Scriptures. The father in the story is out on the road before the speech is finished, and the speech the son had prepared never even gets fully said, and there is no evidence anywhere in the account that the father wanted it said.

You were loved on the worst afternoon of that year, in the room with the jug of water, at the exact hour of it. Scripture says the kindness of God is what leads a man to repentance rather than the other way round, in Romans 2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a kitchen where a rusty staple is holding a document together.

You have not been put on a shorter tether. Isaiah 43 does not say God overlooks or manages or files, it says He blots out, for His own sake, which puts the whole matter on His side of the table rather than yours, and the Holy Spirit makes a man dare to believe a sentence that generous about himself.