The Van Still Has My Name On It

The van is still on the drive and his name is still down the side of it, green letters he chose himself eleven years ago, with the phone number underneath.

He has not moved it in three weeks. There is no reason to move it. In the hall, stacked against the radiator where he put them the night it all came out, are the moving blankets, quilted and gray and smelling faintly of other people's houses. The tape gun sits on top of the pile.

Eight weeks. That is the number he lands on when he cannot sleep. Eight weeks since his name went round this town, and a town this size only ever needs about four days.

The phone stopped almost at once. It simply stopped, and now when it does go it is the bank, or it is his sister ringing to see if he has eaten.

On Saturday he went to the big shop at the top of the hill and saw Trevor, who he has known since they were both nineteen. Trevor found something urgent to do in the boot of his car and stayed there until he had gone past.

He is not angry about Trevor. That is the part he cannot explain to anybody. He mostly just feels tired, and he has started driving forty minutes to the next town to do his shopping, and he has not told a single person that he does it.

On the way back to the car a woman from the chapel caught him up by the recycling bins, and she was warm about it, and she meant every word. She said God has not finished with him. She said He gives abundantly. Then she squeezed his arm and went off to her car.

He sat in the driver's seat for a good while before he put the key in.

That word. Everybody has that word now. And every single time somebody says it to him, what he actually hears is money, and there is none of that either, and he can no longer tell whether he has turned cynical or whether he has been told the truth about what people mean by it.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Somebody handed you a beautiful sentence and you could not get it to reach the ground you are standing on. And if you came to a page with this name on it half hoping the word meant a check, I am not going to make you feel small about that. Nobody who has lost something reaches for the sophisticated thing first.

Let me take the ambiguity off the table

I want to do the plain thing straight away, so that nothing further down is quietly selling you something.

Abundance is not money. Not on this page, not in the verse the word comes out of, and not in anything I am about to put in your hands. It does not mean the phone starting again, and it does not mean your name handed back over the counter of the corner shop by Thursday. Abundance means fullness of life, that is the entire definition, and I am not leaving the word vague so it can do quiet work on you while you read.

Here is the sentence it actually lives in.

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

Look at what the noun is. Life. The word abundantly is not a second parcel with contents of its own; it is a description of how much life, poured up past the top of the cup, and never measured against what a man managed to hold on to.

You are inside the reach of that sentence this afternoon, in a house with the blankets still folded against the radiator, and that is not my encouragement to you. It is what the Shepherd said He came for, written down in John 10 in His own words, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a man whose phone has stopped.

Eight weeks, and everybody else has gone back

Nothing I have just said puts your name back in the mouths of the people who used to say it kindly, and I know that perfectly well, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Eight weeks is a particular kind of distance. The crisis part has finished. Nothing is on fire. What is left is the ordinary machinery of a Tuesday with nothing at all in it, and the forty minute drive to the other shop, and the way a man starts checking who is in a room before he walks all the way into it.

And I am not going to tell you that this was arranged, or that it came with a purpose folded up inside it, or that there is a version of you further down the road who is glad about how it went. Those are the comfortable sentences and they are not true, and I will not put one in your hand while the blankets are still in the hall.

You have not been moved outside of anything. The fullness in that verse was never fitted to a man's standing in his own town in the first place; it was fitted to the man, and Scripture puts it in the hands of a Shepherd who goes out to where the sheep actually is rather than waiting for it at the gate, and His Spirit does not require the ground to be tidy before He fills a person standing on it.

What fullness looks like when the phone is quiet

So what does the word mean in practice, if it is not the diary and it is not the money.

It means the return of ordinary appetite. It means being able to pray without conducting a defense at the same time. It means noticing that something made you laugh before you remembered to stop yourself. It means being loved while producing nothing whatsoever, which most men never learn. It means wanting things again.

You are loved this evening at a depth that has nothing at all to do with what this town has decided, and I am not offering that as a kindness to soften the page. The word of God says He is near to the brokenhearted, Psalm 34 puts it in exactly those words, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes near mean near in a house that has gone too quiet.

None of that is a consolation prize handed over because the real item is out of stock. Life, and more of it, was the headline from the very start. Everything a man builds is scaffolding around a life, and when it comes down it makes an appalling amount of noise, and the merciful thing underneath is that the life is still standing there and God is filling it.

You were not on your own in that car park on Saturday, and you were not on your own the night the blankets went into the hall. Nobody had to explain the details to Him afterwards, because He does not take His account of a man from what a town repeats. That is what is written in Scripture rather than a thought I had, and His Spirit is the one who presses it down into the exact place where the shame sits.