Waiting Until The Car Park Empties

She parks at the far end, by the trolley bay, facing out.

Half past two on a Wednesday is the quiet hour and she has worked that out properly now, the way you work out a bus timetable. After the lunch rush, before the schools. She sits with the engine off and watches the doors and waits until the two women by the trolleys have gone.

Six weeks. Everybody in this town knows, and everybody in the trade knows, and those were the two rooms she had.

The phone is the thing. Not what it says. What it does not do. It used to go all day, and now it goes at ten past nine with the pharmacy reminder and once in the afternoon with something automated about a delivery, and that is the day.

There is a folded newspaper on the passenger seat that has been there five weeks. She has not thrown it away and she does not read it.

Two people have been kind. Properly kind, not curious. One of them still sends a message on a Sunday. The rest went quiet in a way she understands and does not resent, which is somehow worse, because there is nobody to be angry with and nothing to push against, only the slow closing of a town.

She used to be funny. That is the thing she keeps coming back to, sitting in a car park at half past two. She was the one who made people laugh at the counter. And she cannot now imagine ever being that, or being anything with lightness in it, and it is not that she wants a good day and cannot get one. It is that the whole category has gone. She has begun to think that whatever it is in a person that produces gladness has been used up in her, and there is nothing left in the tin.

The doors open and the two women come out and go to their cars and drive off, and she waits another minute, and then she gets out and goes in and gets what she came for.

Maybe that is where you are. Six weeks into being known for the worst thing, and quietly certain by now that nothing good is ever going to be available to you again.

The word on the sign

Before I offer you anything at all, the word over the door of this site has to be given its meaning, because words have done enough to you lately.

Abundance is fullness of life and it is not money, and it is not a restored reputation either. John 10 has Jesus saying He came so that His own would have life, and have it to the full, and the noun in that sentence is life. Not standing. Not a phone that rings again. Life, and more of it, in the life a person is actually living at half past two on a Wednesday.

You have that in a car park with the engine off, and it does not depend on one person in this town changing their mind. It is written in John 10 by the Shepherd Himself, and the Holy Spirit carries a written line into a woman who has worked out the quiet hour.

None of which changes what the town knows. I am not going to move off that quickly, because a page that does is a page written by somebody who has never sat in a car waiting.

Joy is poured, not produced

Here is the sentence that has been quietly running the last six weeks: that gladness is something a person generates, and that the machinery for it has broken in you.

That is not how the verse works. Isaiah 61 says the oil of joy is given for mourning, and given is the whole grammar of it. Oil is poured. It goes onto a head from somebody else's hand, and the one being anointed does not manufacture a drop of it and is not asked to. In the whole picture the mourner's only job is to be there.

You are on the receiving end of that, and it is not conditional on your capacity to feel anything today. Isaiah 61 gives the oil of joy to people who are mourning rather than to people who have recovered, and it is the Holy Spirit who pours rather than the one who inspects the vessel first.

And I am not going to promise you the feeling. That is the honest edge of this and I would rather stand on it than walk you to the end of an article on a promise nobody can keep. What Isaiah puts in the mourner's hands is not a scheduled emotion. It is a Person who pours, and a garment handed over while the ashes are still in the hair.

You were given that garment in the middle of the mourning and not on the far side of it. That is what Isaiah 61 actually says, in that order, and His Spirit is the one who puts it round a person's shoulders while they are still sitting in a car with the engine off.

Six weeks, and the whole category gone

There is a specific kind of flatness at six weeks that people who have not had it do not recognize. It is not sadness. Sadness has weather in it. This is more like a room with a color removed, and the frightening part is not the absence of good days, it is the loss of the belief that the category still exists.

It is worth saying plainly that this is not a spiritual condition, and nobody should treat it as one. A person whose whole social world closed inside a fortnight goes flat, because that is what a human being does under that weight. It says nothing about anybody's faith, it is not the Lord withdrawing, and it is not a verdict being handed down quietly through the feelings. It is shock, and shock has a shape, and it is being carried alone in a car park at half past two.

You have not been emptied of something God needs in order to give you gladness. Isaiah puts the oil in His hand and not in yours, and the word does not once make a mourner responsible for producing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a given thing into a person with nothing left to give.

I am not going to itemize anything about the six weeks. Not what was said about you, not what was true in it and not what was not. That accounting is not mine to open, God has not put me here to open it, and nothing in this article rests on a version where you come out of it clean.

You are not disqualified from being given something, and Scripture will not hand me one verse that says otherwise. Isaiah 61 gives to mourners, plainly, with no eligibility test written anywhere near it, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the giving in that car park rather than in a tidy life.