The Second Toothbrush

The photographs are still in the hall.

There are five of them, in a line going up beside the stairs, and the third one along is the one where somebody caught her laughing with her eyes shut. She has walked past them eleven times today. Taking them down is not a five minute job. Taking them down is an afternoon, and a box, and deciding where the box goes, and she has not got an afternoon like that in her yet.

Three weeks.

Upstairs the second toothbrush is still in the cup by the sink, blue, splayed at the end, and she cannot make her hand throw it away and she cannot explain that to anybody, including herself. The bed got changed on Sunday and there was only one pillow that needed plumping, and she stood there holding it for a while.

The crisis part is over. That is the thing nobody warns you about. The awful conversations have finished, the phone has stopped going, the two friends who came round every night have gone back to their own kitchens and their own evenings, which is right and which is what should happen. Nothing is on fire. It is simply that a life she had is not there any more, and it is a Tuesday, and it is twenty past two.

Somebody from church rang on Saturday. She meant every word of it, and she said: God has got abundance for you, love. A whole new life. He is going to pour it out.

She said thank you. She put the phone on the arm of the chair and sat looking at the hall.

And here is what she was actually thinking, and she would not have said it out loud to the woman who rang, because the woman was being kind and there was nothing wrong with her at all. She was thinking: that word. Everybody keeps handing me that word. And every single time I hear it, what my head does with it is money, and there is none of that here either, and I do not know what I am supposed to do with a sentence like that on a Tuesday afternoon in a hall full of photographs.

Maybe that is where you are. Somebody gave you a beautiful verse and you could not get it to reach the floor you were standing on. And if you came to a page with a name like this one half hoping the word meant something arriving in the post, I am not going to make you small about that. Nobody who has lost something reaches for the sophisticated thing first.

Let me take the word off you first

I want to do the plain part immediately, before anything at all in this message is offered to you under that word, because a page that leaves it vague is doing quiet work on you while you read, and I will not do that to somebody in a house this quiet.

Abundance is not money. Not on this page, not in the verse the word comes from, and not in some careful sense where it mostly means life but a small part of it is an envelope. There is no part of it that is an envelope. It is not the house, it is not the marriage back together, it is not the year wound backwards.

Here is the sentence the word actually lives in.

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

Look at what the noun is. Life. That is the whole gift. Abundantly is not a second parcel with contents of its own; it is a word about how much life, the way a musician marks a note to be held longer than you expect. Fullness. Over the brim. More of it than there was, and not weighed out against anything a person managed to hold together.

So abundance means fullness of life, and that is the entire definition, and it is the only one this page has.

You have that. I am not saying it because it is the warm thing to say to a woman standing at the bottom of some stairs. It is written down in John 10, in the chapter where He calls Himself the Shepherd, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets a sentence like that through three weeks of shock and into an actual person.

And now back to the hall

None of that puts anybody back in the house.

I want to stay here for a minute, because a message that hurries past this has not understood what three weeks is. Three weeks is when the casseroles stop. It is when everybody else has quite properly gone back to their own evenings while ten to five in the morning still arrives with your chest going. It is standing in a hall that has been hoovered a thousand times, holding a pillow.

And I am not going to tell you there was a reason behind it. Not that some design required it, not that a lesson is folded up inside it, not that a few years from now you would thank anybody for it. Those are the comfortable sentences. They are lies, and I am not putting one in your hands while you're standing at the bottom of the stairs.

You are not outside any of this. The fullness in that verse was never fitted to a household or a hall or a row of photographs; it was fitted to a person, and Scripture puts it in the hands of a Shepherd who goes to where the sheep actually is rather than waiting at the gate for it to walk back. His Spirit does not require a house to be tidy or a story to be finished before He fills somebody standing in it.

What fullness looks like in a house with one person in it

So what does it actually mean, if it is not the marriage and not money.

It means feeling things again. It means ordinary tenderness coming back, the afternoon you notice you laughed at something on the radio without deciding to. It means being loved while producing nothing, which most of us have never once had and would not have chosen to learn this way. It means prayer that stops being a negotiation. It means being able to be with people and to want to be. It means sleeping. It means the small astonishing return of wanting anything at all.

You were loved on the worst afternoon of these three weeks, and on the ones nobody saw, and the day itself did not alter it. That is not my kindness, it is the plain sense of John 10, where the life is given by the Shepherd rather than earned by the sheep, and the Holy Spirit carries it in while a person is still holding a pillow.

None of that is a consolation prize brought out because the real thing has gone out of stock. Read the verse again. Life, and more of it, was the headline all along. Everything a person builds around a life is scaffolding, and scaffolding comes down, and the appalling and merciful truth is that the life is still there underneath it and God is filling it.

You have been given fullness in the exact hall you are standing in, and the word of God says life rather than possessions, and His Spirit is pouring it now, on a Tuesday, at twenty past two, into a woman who feels she has nothing to show for herself.

Say it back, in your own words

There is a reason a message like this one ends with your mouth open rather than your head nodding. Something spoken stops being an idea somebody offered you and becomes ground under your feet, and God's people have always found their footing by opening their mouths on what He had already said.

You are not being sold anything here and you have not been handed a slogan. What is written in John 10 is the Shepherd's own sentence about life, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it land in a house where the kettle only gets filled halfway now.