The Anvil Came Out Of The Trailer

The anvil is on the floor of the garage, on the left as you come in, where two of them set it down the week he closed.

It is not bolted to anything now, and that is the detail that gets him when he walks past it to the freezer. For nineteen years it was bolted through the floor of the trailer. The trailer went in June, the anvil came out onto the concrete next to a bag of sand, and there it has stayed.

The rasps are in the canvas roll on the shelf, and the hoof knives with them, still sharp, because he sharpened them the week before he stopped, out of habit. The leather apron hangs on the back of the door with the burn marks across the front, and the garage smells faintly of it when the sun comes round in the afternoon.

Three months. His diary for the year is in the kitchen drawer, and every yard in it found another man inside a fortnight. That is the part that goes round at night. Not the money, not the van going. The fact that Ashcroft and the trekking center and the two places out past the crossroads all had somebody else shoeing by the middle of July, and it made no difference to anybody.

He is fifty four. He has done nothing else since he was seventeen.

And he can trace it. That is the thing he cannot put down. He can sit at that kitchen table and go back through it decision by decision, and most of them have his own handwriting on them. Not all of it was his. Enough of it was that he has stopped arguing the point, even with himself, at three in the morning.

His wife has been good about it, which is worse in a way, and his son rang on Sunday and did not mention it, which he understood and which sat in his chest all day.

On Tuesday he went out for a bag of compost and stood there ten minutes instead, in the smell of it, looking at the anvil on the concrete like something put down and forgotten in a house clearance.

Somebody at chapel told him God works everything together. He believes it in the abstract and cannot make it reach the garage floor.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Not wrongly accused, not unlucky, not somebody a story happened to. Standing in the middle of something you helped to build and then helped to lose, and finding you cannot get a kind word anywhere near you because you know too much about how it went.

The word on the sign, before anything else

The name of this site sounds like money, so let me put that straight before I offer you anything at all under the word.

Abundance is not money and it is not the yards back on your list. It means fullness of life. That is the whole definition, it comes from a sentence about a Shepherd giving life to people rather than restoring their trade, and I am not going to leave it hanging about being vague so it can quietly do some work on you while you read.

That is worth having in your hand early in an article like this one, because when a man knows his own fingerprints are on the ruin, an offer that sounds like payment is the last thing he can receive.

You are loved this afternoon in the garage with the anvil on the floor, and that is not a kindness I am extending to you. God, being rich in mercy, loved us while we were in the middle of the wreck and not after we had got clear of it, Ephesians 2 says exactly that, and the Holy Spirit takes a sentence like that past a man's own arithmetic.

Mercy does not come with an audit

I am not going to itemize your part in it. Not one line of this article is going to go back through the decisions with you.

That is not squeamishness and it is not me being polite. An audit is not what mercy is. If I went through it with you, sorting out which bits were the market and which bits were yours, I would be handing you a set of scales at the exact moment He is handing you something else entirely.

I am also not going to tell you that none of it was yours. You know what you know, and a man cannot receive kindness from somebody who is obviously pretending. The comfort that works is the comfort that does not require you to lie about the last two years.

You have been loved in the wreck you helped to make, with the part that was yours fully known and fully in the room, and this is what is written rather than a soft way of putting it: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. it is His Spirit who takes that off a page and puts it down on a garage floor next to an anvil.

Notice what is missing from that sentence. There is no waiting period in it. There is no preliminary explanation, no accounting, no stage where you set out what happened and He weighs it before deciding how warm to be. The love arrives at the same address as the mess.

Three months, and no lesson extracted

There is a thing people do with a closed business, and they mean well by it, and it is the reason you brace when somebody starts a sentence at chapel.

They want to get to what it taught you. They want the collapse to make sense, so they hand you a purpose for it, or they say it was all in hand. I am not going to do any of that. I do not know why the yards went the way they went, and I am not going to tell you it was arranged, or that there is a version of you further down the road who is glad about it.

What I will do is stay in the garage, because that is where you are, and because mercy is not a lesson and does not need a moral to be worth having.

You are not being held at arm's length by God this afternoon while somebody works out the details. His mercies are new every morning and Lamentations 3 says His compassion does not run out, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land in a man who has been going round it since three o'clock.

And I want to name the small thing under all of it, because it is often the real weight. It is not only the trade. It is the way a man's opinion of himself changes when he has watched something he built come apart with his hands on it. That is heavier to carry into a Sunday than the diary in the drawer, and God has never once required a man to sort it out before He came near him.

You have kindness from Him today that is not conditional on how this started, and that is the plain sense of what is written in Ephesians 2 about mercy being rich rather than measured, and His Spirit is the one who keeps it warm in a room where a man has gone cold on himself.