The Light Table In The Garage

He switches the light table on about once a month, for no reason he could give you.

It is in the garage now, under a dust sheet, wedged between the mower and four boxes of somebody's Christmas decorations. The tubes are on the shelf above it with the cartoons still rolled up inside them, which is what you call the full size paper drawings you work a window out on before you ever cut a piece of glass. Twenty two years of them. Some are for windows that are still in buildings and will be there long after everybody who argued about the colors is dead.

Four years since the workshop went.

Not dramatically. That is the thing. There was no fire and no scandal. The commissions thinned, then the church work went to a firm in the Midlands, then the lease came up, and one Thursday he swept the floor and turned the key and that was that. He works in a school now, three days, in the technician's room, and he likes the children and the hours are regular and there is nothing wrong with any of it.

Nobody has asked him about glass in about two years. Why would they. At a party now he says he works in a school, and it is not even a lie, and it does not catch in his throat any more.

Here is what he cannot do, and it is the only thing he cannot do. He cannot picture next year. Not badly, not vaguely. There is nothing there at all. When he tries, the screen is simply blank, in a way that frightens him a little, because he spent twenty two years being paid to see a thing before it existed and hold it in his head in color, and now he cannot see one single Tuesday of his own that has not already happened.

He stands in the garage with the light table humming and the glass all gone, and the light comes up through empty white.

Maybe that is where you are. Long past the crisis, functioning perfectly well, and completely unable to imagine anything ahead of you at all.

The word first

The word on the front of this site, first, because four years in, a person has heard it used carelessly by enough people to be wary of it.

Abundance is not money, and it is not the workshop lit up again either. It is a word about how much life is in a person, not how much is arranged around them. Fullness of life. That is the meaning, and this page has no second one hidden behind it.

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

Life is the noun. Abundantly tells you how much of it. And notice that it is given rather than assembled, which matters enormously for somebody who cannot picture anything, because a person does not have to see a thing in order to be given it.

You have that fullness right now, four years in, with a blank screen where next year is meant to be. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own voice, and the Holy Spirit carries it to a man standing in a garage with the light coming up through empty white.

Blank is not empty

There is a difference between a blank page and an empty room, and almost nobody makes it while they are frightened. Blank is what it looks like from where a person is standing. Empty is a claim about what is actually there, and nobody in a garage is in a position to make that claim, including me.

The people who love you will try to help by describing it. They will sketch a future for you, kindly, over coffee, and it will be their future and not yours, and you will nod. This message is not going to do that. I am not telling you what is ahead, or when, or what shape it takes, because I do not know, and neither does anybody who says they do.

What I can do is read you what is written.

What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him.1 Corinthians 2:9

You are not failing at something. Read the verse again: no eye has seen it and no heart has imagined it, which means an inability to picture it is exactly what the text describes rather than a fault in you, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds what is prepared while a man's imagination has nothing at all to put on the table.

What is kept is not described

Notice what Paul does not do next. He does not describe it. He had the pen in his hand and the whole letter in front of him, and he leaves it undescribed, on purpose, and goes straight on to say that His Spirit is the one who searches the deep things of God.

You have something kept for you that you are not required to picture, and I am not saying that to make a blank screen feel better. It is what 1 Corinthians 2 says in plain words, that it has been prepared and that no heart has imagined it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the keeping, not you.

This is the mercy in it, and it takes a while to see. If a future had to be imagined before it could be held, then a person whose imagination has gone flat would be shut out of their own life. The text puts the keeping on God's side. Nobody is asking anybody for a vision.

You were not asked for a picture, and you are not being asked for hope as a feeling either. Scripture puts the preparing and the keeping in God's hands and never once makes either wait on the state of yours, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a man who has not been able to see a Tuesday in four years.

Tomorrow, and nothing past it

So the whole ask of this message is one day long, and it is deliberately that small. Not a plan. Not a direction. One ordinary thing tomorrow, said out loud.

It will sound like nothing. Take the tubes down off the shelf. Ring the man about the mower. Walk to the far end of the park instead of the near end. It is not a first step towards anything, and I am not going to dress it up as one, because the moment it becomes a strategy a person is straight back to needing to see the end of it.

You are held today, and tomorrow is as far as anybody is asking you to go. That is not a lowering of the standard, it is the shape of what is written, where the prepared thing is God's to keep and the day in front of you is the one you have actually been given, and His Spirit is in the ordinary day exactly as much as in the imagined one.