The Brass Tap In His Coat

Five months, and he is standing at a kitchen window that belongs to somebody else, waiting on a kettle he does not like.

The flat came furnished. The mugs came with it. Everything he owns now he has bought since February and it all still has that new smell, which he did not know was a smell until everything he had that was old was gone.

In his coat pocket, and it has been there since the week after, is the tap head off the bathroom sink. Brass, with the cross shape on the top, the one that was always slightly loose and that he never got round to. He went back before the skip came and he took one thing. That.

What went is a list and he does not go through the list any more, except at certain hours, and this is one of them. His dad's tools, the whole roll of them, with a name scratched into the handles that was not his dad's name because they had come from somebody before. A biscuit tin of letters his mother wrote in the year she was ill. The door frame between the kitchen and the hall with the pencil marks and the dates going up it in his own handwriting.

He knows which room it started in. He knows what was in that room, and he knows what he did and did not do at half eleven that night, and he is not going to be told by anybody that it was not his, because he was there, and it was.

Five months. The insurance is a process. It has a case number and a woman called Dawn who is genuinely doing her best and who says the word claim so often it has stopped meaning anything. Nobody rings to ask how he is any more. That stopped around week six, which is what happens, and he does not blame one of them.

A neighbor from the old road stopped him outside the Co-op and said, honestly mate, don't beat yourself up. These things happen. And he said thanks, and went home, and stood at this window.

Maybe that is where you are. Holding the one thing you went back for, in a kitchen that is not yours, with a sentence in your head that nobody else can talk you out of because it happens to be true.

The word on the sign, before anything is handed over

Abundance is not money, and here it is not a replacement house either, and both of those need saying out loud to a man in a furnished flat with a case number. Abundance is fullness of life, which is the only meaning the word carries in the verse it is famous from.

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.John 10:10

Life is the noun. Abundantly is the measure of it. There is no clause about contents, no schedule of items, and nothing in it about a biscuit tin. Fullness of life is what is on offer, and that is what a ruined man is inside the reach of at five months.

And you are inside it this evening, with the tap head still in your coat. That is not a soft thing I am saying to a person in a hard week, it is what is written in John 10 about a Shepherd and the life He came for, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that past the part of a man that is still standing in a doorway at half eleven.

Neither an audit nor a discount

One way to ruin this is to sit down with him and go through the night, which nobody has the right to do, and which would not be mercy but accounting with a soft voice. The other way is to do what the neighbor did outside the Co-op and wave it off, which sounds kinder and is worse, because a man who knows what he did cannot be comforted by somebody who has to be wrong about him in order to do it.

So here is what stands in a furnished kitchen at five months. You are loved inside a ruin you had a hand in, and not on a technicality and not because anybody has agreed to look the other way. Scripture puts the reason for mercy in God's own compassions rather than in the record of the person receiving it, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets that past a man's own verdict on himself.

What Lamentations does that nothing else does

There is a book in the Bible written by a man standing in the smoke of a city, and the striking thing about it is that he never once argues the ruin was undeserved. He does not build a case. He sits down in it and says out loud that it is bitter and that he cannot get the taste of it out of his mouth. And then, in the middle of the same poem, without changing his story, he says this.

It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 and 23

Read where that sentence sits in the poem. Not after the city was explained and not after the man was cleared. In the middle of the smoke, with the case still open. You have mercy on exactly those terms, which is to say on no terms at all, and it is written in Lamentations 3 by somebody who never once claimed he did not deserve what happened, and the same Spirit who kept him writing is the one holding a man at a rented sink tonight.

New every morning is a phrase people put on tea towels, and in the poem it is doing something much harder than decoration. New every morning means it is not being drawn down. There is no running total. The mercy that arrived on the second morning after a fire was not a smaller portion than the first, and the mercy at five months is not the remainder of something.

The part that was his

And I am not going to pretend that away, because he would not believe a word of the rest of this if I did. There is a part of it that was his. He knows it, and God knows it, and the two of them have known it since the night, and there has not been one hour since in which God has been finding it out. Mercy that has to be kept away from the truth is a nervous kind of mercy, and it is not what the poem is describing.

Which means you were already carried on the night you were most certain you would not be. That is not a soft reading of the poem, it is the poem, written in Lamentations 3 by a man who would not pretend, and His Spirit is the one who turns a written line into a hand on the shoulder at somebody else's sink.