Same Time In September

Christine did not book the appointment. Her daughter booked it, on the phone, in that bright careful voice people use when they have decided something is good for you and are not going to be argued out of it.

So here she is on a Thursday morning in a salon with three chairs, and the radio is on low, and a woman under the dryer at the back is doing a puzzle book with a biro. There is a toddler on the floor by the window with a plastic comb. Somebody has left a mug on the shelf under the mirror with a lipstick mark on it that is not hers.

It is nice, actually. That is the surprise. The girl doing her hair talks about nothing in particular and does not ask a single question about the last year, and for forty minutes Christine sits in a warm chair and is looked after and does not have to be anybody.

Then it is finished, and the coat goes on, and at the desk the girl says the thing they always say.

"Do you want me to put you in for the same time in September?"

And Christine stands there with her card in her hand and cannot answer.

It is not that September looks bleak. That would be something. When she reaches for September there is simply nothing there. No room, no chair, no version of herself walking in through that door. The last eleven months took the house and the marriage and, apparently, the whole apparatus a person uses for picturing anything at all. She can do this afternoon. She can just about do tomorrow. Beyond that the page is not dark, it is blank, and she has begun to be frightened by how little that frightens her.

"I will ring," she says. "Thanks, love."

You know what that is. Somebody asks you about next year, casually, kindly, the way people do, and you make a noise and change the subject, because the honest answer is that when you look forward you see nothing. You are not being dramatic. You are not refusing to hope. There is genuinely no picture available, and every time somebody encourages you to imagine your future they are asking you to do a thing you have temporarily lost the ability to do, and you go home tireder than you came.

First, Nobody Here Is Going To Describe It To You

Before anything else, one word needs settling, because it is written across the top of this site and the wrong reading of it would ruin everything that follows.

Abundance here does not mean money. It never has and it never will on this ground. It is the word Jesus used when He said He came so that His own could have life, and have it to the full: fullness of life, not a fuller bank, and not a bigger version of what came down. If you arrived here hoping this page would tell you the money is coming back, I will not do that to you, because I have not been told it and nobody should sell it.

And here is the second thing, and it is the promise I actually want to keep with you. I am not going to describe your future. Not one detail. Not a hint about who is in it or what the rooms look like or when any of it turns.

Because look at what Scripture itself does with that subject.

"What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him."1 Corinthians 2:9

Read the three organs it rules out. Not the eye, not the ear, and not the imagination. Paul is not saying the future is hard to picture. He is saying picturing is the wrong instrument altogether, the way a ruler is the wrong instrument for weighing something. Your imagination has gone quiet, and it turns out that the thing God has prepared was never in reach of it in the first place.

You have not lost anything by being unable to picture it. That is written, plainly, and it is His Spirit and not my sympathy that turns it from a clever observation into a weight coming off your shoulders. The very next line of that passage says God reveals these things by His Spirit, which means the picture was always going to be given rather than constructed, and you are not behind.

The Pit Before The Ground

Now let me say the part that has to be said before anything lifts, because a good article can do real damage by arriving at the flowers too early.

It is a ruin, and it is not a setback and not a season. Something came down, and some of it is not coming back, and there are things in the wreckage that you had a hand in and things you did not, and I am not going to sort them into piles for you. Nobody here is auditing that. There is no version of this page where anybody has to account for how the fire started before comfort is allowed in the room.

And I will not tell you the ruin had a purpose. I do not know that, nobody has told me that, and it is the most comfortable lie available in a conversation like this. What I know is that God is in the ashes and not waiting at the far end of them, and that His nearness is not a stage you graduate from.

You are held right now, in the middle of the part that has no shape to it. Scripture says the Lord is near to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit, and near is a location rather than a schedule. His Spirit makes that true in a salon doorway with a card in your hand and no answer available.

Kept, Not Built

Here is what turns, and it is smaller and steadier than a vision.

There is a difference between a future somebody has to build and a future that is being kept. A built future has to be imagined first, planned, and then carried by you, and that is exactly the arrangement there is no capacity for at the moment. A kept future is somewhere else entirely, in somebody else's hands, unaffected by whether you can see it today.

Peter says there is an inheritance that does not fade, kept for you. Kept. It is a word about storage and safekeeping rather than about effort, and the keeping is happening whether you are having a good week or lying on the settee at four in the afternoon with the telly on for company.

You have a future that is being held for you, and holding it is not your job. It is written that what God prepares is beyond imagining and that it is kept, not commissioned, and His Spirit is the guarantee of it rather than your outlook. You do not have to build tomorrow tonight. You do not have to want it yet. Wanting is a kind of strength and yours is spent, and God knows the difference between a person who has refused and a person who is empty.