Two Keys And A Plastic Tag

Two keys on a ring with a plastic tag, and the tag had the address written on it in somebody else's handwriting.

He put them down on the counter and the woman behind it turned them round with one finger to check the number, and said thank you, and that was the whole of it. It took less than a minute. He had been dreading it for eleven weeks and it took less than a minute and then he was outside on the pavement in the rain.

Ten months ago now. He is sitting in the car outside the rented place because the car is the only room in his life with a door he can shut. Monday, about two, and he is meant to be looking at something on his phone and he is not.

What he does instead, most days, is go back over that stretch before it happened. The letter in the drawer. The morning he nearly rang somebody and did not, because he thought there was more time in it than there was. He runs it the way you run a tape, and it comes out the same, and he runs it again.

The redundancy was the first domino and everybody was very sympathetic about the redundancy. Nobody quite knew what to say about the rest. His daughter shares a room now with her brother and has been extremely good about it, which is somehow the worst part of the whole thing.

Ten months in, the phone has gone quiet. People were kind for about a month, properly kind, and then their own lives quite rightly picked up again. Nobody is unkind. There is just nothing coming in now, no calls with that tone, no casseroles, and no crisis to be in the middle of.

And when he tries to picture next year, there is nothing there. Not something bad. Nothing at all. He tries to see a Christmas, or a summer, or where any of them are living, and the frame is just empty, and after a few seconds he stops trying because it makes his chest go.

Somebody at church said, God has a plan for you, in the kindest voice imaginable, and he said thanks. And then he sat in the car park for ten minutes thinking: I know. I believe you. I cannot see one single thing, and being told there is a picture does not help when I have not got the picture.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Somebody handed you a beautiful verse about a future and you could not make it reach the seat you were sitting in.

Not money. Not once.

Abundance is not money. Not on this page, not in the verse it comes from, and not in some careful way I am going to leave open so you keep reading. Nothing on this site ties the fullness of God to a sum, a wage, a set of keys, or anything at all that arrives in an envelope.

It means fullness of life. That is the Shepherd's sentence in John 10, where the noun is life, and abundantly is a measure word describing how much of it. That is the definition, and it is the only one this place will ever hand you.

You have that definition in your hands now, and it reads exactly the same for a man in a rented place as it does for anybody else. It is written in John 10 with life as the noun and no arithmetic anywhere near it, and the Holy Spirit makes a plain sentence land in a car on a Monday afternoon.

And if you came to a domain with this name over the door because the second word sounded practical, I am not going to be clever about that either. You lost a house. Of course you looked. Nobody in a ruin reaches for the sophisticated thing first.

The verse that refuses to describe it

Here is the one I want in your hands, and the reason I want it is that it does the opposite of what encouragement usually does.

Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.1 Corinthians 2:9

Read what it is actually saying. Not that the picture is good and you should try harder to see it. That no eye has seen it. That no ear has had it described. That it has not entered into a man's heart, which is to say that a human being sitting in a car on a Monday afternoon is not equipped to picture the thing, and the verse says so as a plain fact rather than as a rebuke.

So the empty frame is not a symptom of anything wrong with you. You are not failing at faith by being unable to picture something Scripture says has not been seen.

You are held while the frame stays empty, and that is not my reassurance, it is what is written in a verse that puts the seeing beyond human sight altogether, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a man steady in the meantime rather than requiring him to visualize his way there.

Nobody is going to describe it to you

I want to be careful with you now, because this is where people start filling in the blank, and they mean well when they do it.

I am not going to tell you what the years ahead of you hold. Not next year, not five from now, not in any shape. I have no information about it, nobody who has spoken to you about it has any either, and a description invented to comfort a man is a fabrication however warm the voice was.

I am not going to date anything. There is no season promised here, no this time next year, and no quiet suggestion that a corner is about to be turned.

And I will not tell you the collapse was arranged in order to produce something. Not that a reason exists which somebody could write on a card, and not that a further-along version of you is grateful for the counter and the plastic tag. Those are the comfortable sentences and they are lies, and I am not putting one in your hands while a man is sitting in a car with the door shut.

You have a future that is kept rather than pictured. Scripture puts it as prepared, past tense, by Him, for those who love Him, which is a completed thing on His side entirely independent of your ability to imagine it, and His Spirit is the one who holds a person in a blank frame without asking them to fill it in.

Hope is not a feeling you owe anybody

There is a version of church that would ask you to feel hopeful now, and I am not going to do that, because you very likely have none available and manufacturing it would be a performance for my benefit rather than an encounter with God.

Hope in the Scriptures is not a mood. It is an anchor, which is a piece of ironmongery on the far end of a rope, and the point of an anchor is precisely that it holds when the man on the boat is not feeling anything at all.

So you do not have to be able to picture next year. You do not have to want to. Nothing tomorrow is a legitimate answer, and a man who can only manage a single ordinary thing in the morning has not fallen short of anything here.

You were loved on the day the keys went across that counter, at that hour, in the rain outside, and not one degree less than you are loved in the car this afternoon. The word of God commends His love toward us while we are nowhere near sorted, in Romans 5, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a sentence that size through a shut car door.