The Marks Were On The Door Frame

The form asks her to list the contents of the dining room, item by item, with a value beside each one.

She has been sitting with it for forty minutes at somebody else's kitchen table. She has written down a table and six chairs. Under that she has written the word letters, and stopped, because the next column wants a figure and there is not one.

Three weeks. Three weeks since half past one in the morning, and the smoke alarm, and the noise a house makes, another thing nobody warns you about.

Her father's tools were in the cupboard at the back: a wooden plane he had from his own father, a spirit level with brass ends, a chisel with his initials burned into the handle. They were worth nothing to anybody except that they were the shape of his hands. The letters were in a shoebox on top of the wardrobe. Some from her mother, some from a friend who died at twenty-six, read perhaps four times in thirty years, and she knew exactly where they were, which turns out to have been the whole point of them.

And the door frame between the kitchen and the hall. Every child, every summer, in pencil, with the dates. She thinks about that one at odd moments, and it is not even the biggest loss on the list, and it is the one that takes her legs out.

The flat is fine. That is the word for it. Clean, warm, and somebody else's, and the mugs are somebody else's, and she puts her hand out at night for a light switch that is not on that wall.

People were extraordinary in the first week. Bags of clothes, a hot meal at the door every night, a man two streets down turning up with a car full of towels. By three weeks it has thinned the way it always does, correctly, because everybody has their own lives, and there is a strange silence after the kindness stops.

Her husband asked her at the weekend where she saw them in a year. She said she did not know. What she did not say is that when she tries to picture anything at all past about Thursday there is nothing there. Not something bad. Nothing. A flat gray with no picture in it.

Somebody at the school gate said God was going to give them a beautiful new home and she should hold on to that.

Maybe that is where you are. Somebody asks what is next and there is no picture in your head at all, and you have started to wonder whether that means something is wrong with your faith.

The word on the door, before anything else

I am going to say what the word means here before I offer you anything under it, because a vague word does quiet work on a person who is three weeks in.

Abundance does not mean money and it does not mean a property. It means fullness of life. That is the whole definition and it is the only one this page will ever hand you. There is a form on your table with a column for values on it, and God is not filling that column in. He is doing something else entirely, in you, and it is not smaller.

You have life in you at three weeks, before a single thing is settled and before anybody has decided anything about the claim, and I am not saying it as a nice thought. It is John 10:10, where the Shepherd says what He came to give, and the Holy Spirit gets a sentence like that as far as a borrowed kitchen table.

The gray with no picture in it

I want to talk about the thing you did not say to your husband.

When a person tries to look forward and there is nothing there, that is not a spiritual failure and it is not the absence of faith. It is what happens to a mind three weeks after a house burns. The part that used to run pictures of next summer has gone quiet, and it went quiet for reasons that have nothing to do with what anybody believes about God.

Nearly every article about a future asks the reader to imagine one. Write the vision. Picture it. See yourself there. Handed to somebody in your position, that is not encouragement, it is an exam that cannot be sat today.

So I am not going to ask you to picture anything, and I am not going to describe your future to you either, because I do not know it, and a stranger telling a woman three weeks after a fire what her life will look like is making it up.

Here is what is actually available instead.

My times are in Your hand.Psalm 31:15

Not my picture of my times. My times. The line is about who is holding them, and it was written by a man in serious trouble who could not see the end of it any more than you can see Thursday.

You are held inside a future you cannot picture, and the holding does not depend on any ability to see it, and that is not a comforting phrase I have arranged. It is written in Psalm 31, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it real to somebody with a flat gray where the pictures used to be.

Nothing is a legitimate answer

If somebody asks what there is to hope for and the honest answer is nothing at all, then nothing at all is what you say.

Hope in the Scriptures is not a feeling anybody generates. It is a person you are attached to, and the attachment holds when the feeling is entirely absent, which is most of what the word actually shows about it. There are people all through the Bible who kept walking with God with no picture in front of them, and not one of them is described as failing.

You have not been asked for a vision, and nobody is measuring the size of the picture in your head, and I am not saying it to let anybody off. It is what is written about a God who keeps a person's times in His own hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding the far end of a day you cannot see the shape of.

Tomorrow, and no further

So here is the whole ask, and it is deliberately small.

One thing tomorrow. Not next year. Not the claim, not where anybody is living, not the conversation everybody keeps trying to have with you. One ordinary thing tomorrow, said out loud, and nothing past it.

That is not a lowered ambition. It is the size the day actually is at three weeks, and God has never once been embarrassed by a person's small day. The manna came one morning at a time and it was not a punishment, it was the shape of the arrangement.

You were given tomorrow and it is genuinely yours, and that is not a promise about what is in it, because I do not know what is in it. It is what is written about times held in a hand that is not yours, and His Spirit is the one who brings a person through one day at a time when the year is completely dark to them.