Seven Months In The Box Room

The suitcases are still under the single bed and they are still about a third full, and that is the thing her sister has been kind enough not to mention.

Seven months. There is a shelf now, and a chest of drawers with two drawers cleared for her, and an ironing board that lives in the wardrobe because there is nowhere else for it. Her clothes are in the drawers. But the suitcases have never actually finished, and every time she thinks about doing it properly something in her sits down.

She is fifty two. Eighteen years in a town on the coast, running the front desk of a small hotel and then most of the hotel, in a language she learned so well that people stopped asking where she was from. She had a flat with a balcony, a woman she walked with on Thursday evenings, and a way of buying fish that took her four years to learn.

It came apart quickly at the end, the way these things do, and she came back with what she could carry and a phone number nobody in this country has any use for. The old SIM is in the drawer with the batteries and the passport. She still knows how to say things there is nobody within ninety miles to say them to.

It is Sunday morning. She is in the back row of her sister's chapel because her sister asked her to come and because it is easier than staying in the house on her own.

The words are up on the screen. It is a good song and she has known it for thirty years, and the woman in front of her has both hands up and is singing it like she means every syllable, which she probably does.

And nothing will come out. She opens her mouth on the second line and it will not go, because the sentence on the screen says something about goodness pouring over her life and she cannot make her mouth say a thing about her life this morning that would be true.

So she stands there and holds the back of the chair in front of her and moves her lips a bit at the chorus so as not to make her sister uncomfortable, and she thinks: I used to be good at this.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Standing up, dressed, in a room full of people who mean it, unable to produce four honest words, and starting to wonder whether the problem is you.

The word on the sign, and what it is not

Before anything else. The name over this page sounds like money, and if that is what brought you here I am not going to make a fool of you for it.

But abundance does not mean money, and this morning it especially does not mean your old life posted back to you in the shape it was. Abundance means fullness of life. That is the whole of the definition, it is the plain sense of what the Shepherd said in John 10, and I would rather hand it to you straight in the first minute than let the word do something quiet to you while you read.

Fullness of life is a thing that can be true of a woman standing in a back row with her mouth shut. That is precisely why the definition matters.

You are received this morning exactly as you came in, with nothing produced and nothing performed and the chorus gone past you, and that is not me being nice about it. Scripture says to pour out your heart before Him, Psalm 62 puts it that way, and the invitation is to pour out what is in there and not a tidied version, and the Holy Spirit carries a heavy thing to God and calls it worship on the way.

The garment is given, never demanded

Isaiah 61 says a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. People quote it at each other as though it were an instruction, and it is not one. It is a list of things being handed over.

Read the whole line and notice who is doing the work in it. Beauty is given for ashes. Oil is given for mourning. The garment is given for heaviness. Nobody in that sentence is being told to cheer up, and nobody is being told that the heaviness disqualifies them. A garment is put on a person. It is not generated by them.

So the question this morning is not whether you can produce the feeling that the woman in front of you appears to have. The question is much smaller than that, and much kinder. It is whether there is one sentence you could say out loud that would be completely true.

You have been given the garment rather than charged for it, and that is what is written in Isaiah 61 rather than my way of softening the room, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts a thing like that on a person who has nothing to hand over in exchange.

Four words is a whole offering

Here is the practical shape of it, and I want to be very plain because a woman in a back row does not need a paragraph of atmosphere.

Praise that is not true is not praise. It is manners, and manners are a fine thing in a village hall and a poor thing at an altar. God has never asked for manners, and He is not standing at the front of your sister's chapel counting who has their hands up. A sentence that is honest and four words long goes further with Him than three verses sung by somebody who has gone somewhere else in her head.

So find the true one. Not the best one. The true one. It might be: You are still here. It might be: I do not understand this. It might be: You are God and I am not, and that is all I have got this morning. Any of those is worship, because worship is what happens when a person tells God the truth about who He is with their mouth.

You are not disqualified from worship by heaviness. Heaviness is named right there in Isaiah 61 as the thing the garment is given for rather than the thing that keeps it away, and His Spirit is the one who takes four honest words and does with them what a great deal of enthusiasm could never do.

And I am not going to tell you why this happened, or what the eighteen years were for, or that there is something waiting that suits you better. I do not know, and anybody who says it to you in the tea queue is guessing. What I will say is that the God you cannot sing about this morning has not gone anywhere, and that He is not embarrassed by the back row.

You were worshipping when you stood up and stayed in the room with your mouth shut, and that is not a consolation prize. Scripture is full of people bringing God what they actually had rather than what they wished they had, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives it and does not send it back for improvement.