The Coin In The Kitchen Drawer

The coin is in the drawer with the takeaway menus and the batteries and a screwdriver nobody owns.

It has a number on it. He put it in there face down in the spring and has not moved it since, and every time he goes into that drawer for a fuse or a rubber band he pushes it aside with two fingers without looking at it, the way people move something they are not ready to have a conversation with.

Three months. Eleven years before that, and then a Thursday, and then three months.

He is in a spare room at a friend's house on the other side of town. The friend is good about it, properly good, does not talk about it and does not pointedly not-talk about it either, and leaves the landing light on because he knows about the nights. His daughter rings on Sundays. She is careful with him on the phone now in a way she was not in March, and the care is worse than anger would be, and he would not say that out loud to anybody.

The job went in the first fortnight. The house was already going before that, for reasons that were also his. He is not confused about any of it. He can lay it out in order and he does, most nights, between about two and four.

What he cannot do is sing.

That is the thing he did not expect. He went back to the building three weeks ago because a man he trusts asked him to and he could not think of a way to say no. He stood in the fourth row while everybody around him sang about the goodness of God, and he opened his mouth and there was nothing in it he could say that would be true, so he closed it again and stood there with his hands at his sides for eleven minutes.

He has not been back inside. He drives to the car park some Sundays and sits with the engine off until people start coming out.

A woman on the door that morning had said, warmly, that he should just praise his way through it. She had no idea. She meant it as a door and it landed as a demand.

Maybe that is where you are. There is a song on and everybody is singing it and you cannot get one honest word out, and you have started to think that says something about you.

The word first, because it is on the sign

Before anything else I will say what abundance means here, so that nothing further on is quietly trading on it.

It is not money. Abundance in the verse it comes from means fullness of life, that is all it has ever meant, and nothing on this page is going to be handed to you under that word except life. Not the job back. Not the house. If part of you came to a site with this name half hoping otherwise, that is a completely ordinary thing to hope after three months and I am not going to be smart about it.

You have not been shut out of that word by three months, and I am not going to leave it to be inferred. It is John 10:10, where the Shepherd names life as the thing He came to give, and the Holy Spirit takes that sentence into a spare room with the landing light on.

Praise is given, it is never demanded

The line in Isaiah is very carefully worded, and almost everybody quotes it wrong.

the garment of praise for the spirit of heavinessIsaiah 61:3

A garment is put on somebody. It is handed over. It is not produced by the person wearing it and it is not a test they pass. Read the line again and notice that the heaviness is named first, and named without a single word of rebuke attached to it. God says heaviness out loud before He says praise. He is not embarrassed by it and He does not require it gone before He hands anything over.

So when somebody tells you to praise your way through it, they have turned a gift into a toll. They almost never mean it that way. It lands that way every time.

You are not required to feel anything in order to be received today, and that is not a lowered standard. It is what is written in Psalm 51, where God says plainly what He will not despise, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings a broken sentence to Him without smoothing it out on the way.

What is actually true right now

Here is the only rule for the praise I am going to ask you for, and it is one rule: it has to be true.

Not big. Not warm. True. If the only true sentence available this afternoon is that God is still here, then that is the whole song, and it is not a lesser version of praise, it is praise with nothing counterfeit in it.

The Psalms are full of this. A man writes that his bones are wasting and that he is worn out with groaning, and then in the same breath says something plain and true about God, and the two sit in one poem without either canceling the other. Nobody edited the first half out. That is what got kept.

Short is not a failure of praise either. A true sentence four words long carries more than a paragraph nobody meant, and God has never once preferred the longer one.

You have somewhere to put a heavy sentence, right now, tonight, exactly as it is, and I am not saying it to soften anything. It is written into Psalm 51 that the sacrifice God accepts is a broken spirit, and His Spirit is the one who carries it up rather than requiring anybody to make it presentable first.

No audit at the door

I am not going to go through the three months with you, and I am not going to tell you it was nothing.

You know your part in it. You lay it out most nights between two and four, and there is no need for a stranger with a keyboard to add anything to that column. And I will not tell you the other thing either, the one where none of it was really yours, because that means telling a man his own memory is lying to him, and that is not comfort.

What I will say is that mercy in the Scriptures does not wait for the accounting to finish. It never once has. God moved toward people while it was still going on, which is the whole scandal of the thing, and it is the only reason any of us has anything at all to say on a Sunday.

You were not put outside anything three months ago, and you are not standing in a queue behind the people who managed it, and that is not my leniency. It is what the word says about a God who does not deal with a person according to what they have done, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying it to a man in a fourth row who could not open his mouth.