The Bag Is Still By The Door

It is twenty to ten and he has ironed a shirt.

He did not decide to. He got the board out on Saturday night the way he has got the board out on a Saturday night for nine years, and he was halfway down the second sleeve before he understood what he was doing, and by then it seemed sillier to stop.

The bag is by the back door. Canvas, with a strap mended once with a boot lace, and it is still packed. The register. The blu tack. The spare batteries for the little radio microphone. A tin with biscuits in it, and he does not want to think about how long those have been in there. The extension lead is coiled round the handle the way he coiled it on the last Sunday, and he did not know it was the last Sunday, which is a thing he keeps coming back to.

Six weeks.

It went in a week. That is what nobody outside it understands. On the Tuesday there was a meeting, and by the Sunday there was no service, and the room they hired went back to being a room, and the group on his phone went from forty three messages a day to a birthday and then to nothing.

And the thing he cannot say out loud, because there is nobody left to say it to who would not take it as a criticism, is that it was three things at once. It was his work. It was his church. And it was every single person he ate with. All of it went in the same week, and now he has a kitchen and a Sunday and an ironed shirt.

Nobody did anything wicked. He wants that on the record, even here, even inside his own head. Things came apart. People made the decisions people make. He is not carrying a list of villains, and in a way that is worse, because there is nowhere at all to put any of it.

The radio is on and something comes on that he used to play, and he opens his mouth, because he has opened his mouth on a Sunday morning since he was nineteen.

Nothing true comes out. He can hear the words and he knows every one of them and he cannot make his mouth say a single one without lying, and he stands at the counter with his hands flat on it and lets the song finish on its own.

Maybe that is where you are. Dressed for something that is not happening, in front of a God you still believe in, with a mouth that will not make the shape any more and a suspicion that this is the part where you are supposed to push through.

The word, and then the thing underneath the shirt

Abundance is not money, and it is not a platform, and it is not a room with people in it again. Jesus said He came so that people would have life and have it abundantly, John 10 verse 10, and the noun in that sentence is life. Fullness of life is what the word means on this page, and part of fullness is being allowed to be honest in front of God, which is not a small part of it and is not a consolation prize.

And here is the thing underneath the ironed shirt. You are not required to produce a feeling this morning. Psalm 42 is a man remembering how he used to go with the crowd to the house of God, with the sound of joy, and saying so to God while his soul is cast down inside him. That is in the songbook on purpose, and the Holy Spirit put it there for a man standing at a counter six weeks in.

Read what that psalm actually does. It does not resolve into a feeling. It tells God the truth about the memory and about the distance in the same breath, and it is worship the whole way through, and nobody edited it out of the book for being heavy.

So what you have this morning is already enough to worship with. Not enough to lead with, and I am not asking you to lead anything ever again unless He asks you to. Enough to worship with, because Scripture's own songs are full of men saying heavy true things upward, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes four true words and carries them exactly as far as a whole set used to go.

Heavy is allowed in this room

There is a lie in circulation and it is usually taught by implication rather than said out loud. It is that heaviness is a fault in a believer, and that a person who cannot manage the joy has something wrong with their walk rather than a weight on their chest. Nobody teaches that from a pulpit in those words. It gets taught by what happens to a room when somebody answers the how are you honestly.

You are not in trouble for the silence at the counter. Isaiah 61 says the garment of praise is given to those with a spirit of heaviness, which means the heaviness was assumed in the sentence, and the garment was handed to people who were wearing it rather than to people who had got over it. The Holy Spirit is the one who puts a garment onto somebody, and nobody in that verse is asked to weave one.

Given, not demanded. That is the whole difference between a garment and a performance, and it is the difference between what Isaiah actually says and what a Sunday morning can accidentally ask of a person who has nothing left to bring.

And you were received on the last Sunday and you are received on this one, and the size of what you can manage has never once changed the reception. Scripture puts God near to the ones whose spirit is crushed and it never grades the volume, and His Spirit is the one who carries a whisper exactly as far as He carried a full room.

What is actually true, said out loud

So here is what praise is on a morning like this one. It is not enthusiasm and it is not volume and it is not a face. It is true speech aimed at God. That is the entire definition, and there is no minimum length attached to it anywhere in Scripture.

You have something true you could say to Him right now, and it is probably about four words long, and four words is a complete sentence. God, You are real. God, You are here. Lord, I am still Yours. Any of those, if it is true this morning. Scripture is not asking for the full set, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over a kitchen counter with a stopwatch.

And if today's true sentence is a short one, it is not a lesser thing than a long one. It is the thing itself, at the size it actually is, which is the only size it was ever going to be honest at.