Anything, Really

The chairs are bolted in a row, which he notices every time and has never once said anything about. Screen on the wall. Numbers going up in order, slowly, and the heating on far too high for the time of year.

He is fifty-eight. He worked a trade for thirty-one years, and his hands still go to it: he cannot watch somebody carry a door through a doorway without his shoulders doing the lift with them.

He has done two courses now. The first was for something the town needed right up until it did not. The second finished in the summer and he passed it, and the certificate is in a folder in the car, because he could not decide this morning whether bringing it would look prepared or look desperate, and in the end he left it on the passenger seat.

His number comes up. The work coach is kind, and quick, and about the same age as his daughter, and she asks him the ordinary question, the one they have to ask.

What sort of thing are you looking for.

And he hears his own voice say: anything, really.

He is out in the car park before it lands. Not the appointment. The sentence. He said anything, really, and he meant it helpfully, and he has been saying it for a while now without hearing it.

Because he did not used to be an anything. He was a specific man who did a specific thing, and somewhere across these last few years he has quietly agreed to be a general one instead, and nobody made him agree, and there was no day he could point at when he did.

That is the sentence he drives home with. And you know it, or you would have gone somewhere else by now.

God has never once dealt in general terms

Here is the first thing to know about how God speaks, and it takes about ten seconds to say and rather longer to let in.

He does not do categories. He counts the stars and calls every one of them by a name of its own (Psalm 147:4), which is a strange way to run a sky if the point was only to have stars. He calls His own sheep by name and leads them out (John 10:3), name by name, in a job where a number would honestly be simpler.

That is His habit and it holds when He turns to you. You are not a category to Him this afternoon, and you never once were. He has a specific word about you and He has never blurred it into a general one, because the written word shows Him naming individuals with almost inconvenient precision, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that word off a page and speaks it into a man's chest in a car park.

Anything, really, is a fine answer to give a work coach. It is a description of a vacancy. It was never a description of you, and the two got mixed up somewhere along the way without your permission.

What He did with His hands

Now let me take you to the place where God says this Himself, and notice who He is answering when He says it.

Zion has just said the worst thing a person can say. The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me. That is not a bad mood, that is a considered verdict, arrived at over a long stretch of nothing changing.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.Isaiah 49:15 and 16

Graven. Cut in. Not written down where writing can be rubbed out, and not filed where a file can be closed, but cut into the working part of His hands, which is the part that does not stop being used.

A man whose hands know a trade understands what that costs and what it means. You do not engrave something you might revise. And He did it to His own hands, and then He went and had them opened again on a cross, and the marks that name you are the marks He kept.

So take this where you are sitting. You are engraved, right now, today, on hands that have not put you down. Isaiah 49:16 is the ground under that and not my sympathy for your situation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient sentence land on a man in a car park as something true about him rather than something nice about somebody else.

What a name does not do, said plainly

I am not going to insult you by pretending this fixes the thing you came here with.

God's name for you does not fill in a form. It does not get you the interview, it does not answer the letter, and it will not be waiting for you on the mat when you get in. Nothing on this page pretends to know what happens next about the work or the money.

Keep going to the appointments. Ask for whatever help is there to be asked for, and ask without a scrap of shame about it, because faith has hands and using them is the whole reason it has them.

What a name does is decide who is walking into that room. That is not a small thing and it is not a consolation prize handed out instead of the real thing, because the man who walks in named is the same man walking into the same room, and he is not walking in as an anything.

You have a name from God that is not up for review this year, and Hebrews 13:8 says He is the same yesterday, today and forever, which means His word about you does not move with the market. The same Spirit who called you by that name when things were steady has not revised it since, because He does not revise.