The Name Is Still On The Van

He goes out on a Friday and starts the van so that the battery does not die.

That is the whole job. Turn the key, let it run for twenty minutes, turn it off. He did it standing up at first and then he gave that up and started getting in, because standing next to your own van on your own drive where the neighbors can see you is its own particular thing.

The signwriting is still on the door. His name, in the dark green he chose himself eleven years ago, and underneath it the trade, and underneath that the number. The number is the part he cannot look at. It is the same number that used to go three or four times before he had his boots on.

Three months.

Something happened. Everybody in this town has a version of it and one of the versions is close, and he is not going to be the one who explains it to you, and I am not going to ask him to. What matters for the next twenty minutes is what a Friday afternoon is like now.

The phone does not ring. That is the thing nobody prepares you for. Not the shouting, because the shouting was the first fortnight. It is the not ringing. It is the silence of a device on a windowsill that used to be the sound of a living.

He went to the tip on Tuesday and a man he has known since school saw him from the metal skip and did that thing, that lift of the chin, and then found something urgent to do with a length of guttering. Not cruelty. Just a man who did not know what his face was supposed to do.

His mother in law rang and said, kindly, meaning nothing but kindness: these things blow over, love. Give it till Christmas.

He said yes. He said thanks for ringing. He put the phone down and sat with his hands on his knees for a long time.

Now the engine is going and the heater is on, because it is easier to sit in a warm van than in the house where his wife is being brave at him. The wipers have a leaf under them from October. There is a screwed up receipt in the door pocket from a job in March, back when a Friday had six hours in it and a bacon roll at eleven.

Twenty minutes. He watches the clock on the dash. He does not put the radio on, because a song might get in.

Maybe that is where you are. Three months, or six, or ten, and the crisis part is over and nothing is on fire and everyone else has gone back to their lives, and you are sitting somewhere warm with the engine running and nowhere to drive it.

What the word means here, said once and plainly

Abundance is not money. It is not a check and it is not the number ringing again and it is not the town changing its mind about you. 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. Abundantly is how much of it. So abundance means fullness of life, and on this page it will never quietly mean anything else.

And here is what fullness includes on an afternoon like this one. You are not on your own in the van. That is not my encouragement and it is not a figure of speech. Psalm 34 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit, and near is a location word. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a location word true inside a man who cannot look at his own phone.

Near is the whole content of that verse. Not fixing. Not explaining. Not standing at a distance until the town has decided what it thinks. Near, which is a fact about where somebody is rather than about how the situation is going.

So take it as it stands, because it stands whether or not it is felt. You have been drawn near to, in a van, on a drive, with the signwriting still on the door and nothing about any of it settled. The word of God puts God's nearness on the side of the crushed rather than on the side of the cleared, and His Spirit is the one carrying that in while the heater runs.

Nobody here is moving you on

There is a thing done to people in your position and it is nearly always done gently. Somebody wants you further along than this, because your being here is uncomfortable for them, and the moving on arrives dressed as encouragement. Give it till Christmas. Onwards and upwards. Every one of those sentences is a request, and the request is that you stop being where you actually are.

You are not being hurried. Not by Him. There is no schedule that you have fallen behind, and Scripture never once shows God tapping His foot at the edge of somebody's grief. He sat in the dust with Job for a week before anybody spoke a word, and He wept at a grave He was walking towards. The Holy Spirit is patient in a way that people, even kind people, cannot sustain for three months.

Three months is when it gets hardest and least visible. The casseroles stopped weeks ago. The people who were furious on your behalf have run out of fury and gone back to their own lives, which is not disloyalty, it is simply what people are.

And you were not written off in the week it broke. Whatever the town holds about you, and whatever of it is true, God's dealing with a person has never once been a matter of public consensus. Scripture says He knows what we are made of and remembers that we are dust, and the Spirit says that inside a man rather than about him.

Held, and not moved along

So what is being offered on a Friday afternoon is not a lift out of the van. It is company in it. That sounds smaller than it is, until a man has sat there twenty minutes with the clock on the dash and understood that company was the only thing he actually wanted.

You are held right where you are sitting, and He is not waiting for you to be further along. That is the sentence I would want somebody to say to me, and I am not the one who said it first: it is the shape of Psalm 34 and the shape of a shepherd who walks to where the sheep is. The Holy Spirit is the one who carries it past the shame that has been sitting in your chest since the week it broke.

Nothing lifts in this article. I want to say that plainly, because a lift has been promised to you by people who love you and could not deliver one. What changes on this page is not the situation and not the town. It is that there is somebody in the van.