Between The Halves

Ten past ten in the morning, and he has been up since four, and he is not due back on the road until two.

The canteen has the good chairs at one end and the wobbly ones at the other, and a vending machine that takes the money and thinks about it. Somebody has left a paper open at the crossword with three answers in. The window is high up and the light comes in above head height, which is a strange thing to notice after twenty two years and he notices it every single time.

Two of the lads come through and one of them is talking about a kitchen he is having done. Not showing off. Just talking, the way people do, and there is nothing wrong with him at all, and that is somehow the part that does the damage.

Because here is the sentence that arrives in the canteen and it arrives fully formed: I have done everything right for twenty two years and I am sitting in a room with a wobbly chair waiting for the second half of my own day.

He does not say it. He has never said it. He turns the mug round on the table and finishes the crossword somebody else started.

He used to pray about the money. He would tell you he still does, and what he means is that he says something in the cab at half four in the morning out of habit. What has come up in the place where the praying was is something harder, and it has been coming up for about two years, and he can feel it in how he answers his wife.

That is the thing he would not tell anybody. Not the shift. Not the money. The hardness.

If there is a sentence in you that has never been out of your mouth, come and sit at the good end of the table with me.

I am not going to tell you off

Let us get this settled in the first minute, because otherwise you will read the rest of it with your guard up and you will not hear a word.

I am not going to correct the bitterness. I am not going to call it a root, or a sin problem, or a thing to be repented of before God will deal with you. I am not going to explain to you what it is doing to your health or your marriage. You know. Nobody has ever needed to be told what the hardness is costing them, because they pay it daily and in person.

And I am not going to ask you to soften it first so it becomes presentable. That is the request that has kept the sentence in your head for two years.

Hear this in the canteen, with the mug going round on the table. You are welcome exactly as you have turned out, and that is not my generosity, it is His: Romans 5:8 says that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, which means the whole arrangement was built for people met at their worst, and the Holy Spirit is the One who put the word while in that sentence, so that nobody would think there was a tidying-up stage first.

There is no queue you have to get soft to join. You are already in the room.

The man who said it far worse than you do

Job lost everything, and then his friends came and sat down, and then Job opened his mouth.

I will not restrain my mouth, he says. I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul (Job 7:11). He goes further than that in places. He says God has worn him out. He asks why he is even being watched. He says things that would clear a prayer meeting.

And at the end of it, when God speaks, He turns to the friends, the careful ones, the ones who kept explaining and correcting, and He says they have not spoken of Him what is right, as His servant Job has (Job 42:7).

Read that until it sinks. The bitter man is the one who spoke rightly. The tidy men, who kept his complaint respectable, are the ones told they got it wrong.

You are holding something God has already dignified in His own book, and I am not stretching a verse to comfort you: the written word puts Job's bitterness on the page in full and then calls the man who spoke it right, and the Holy Spirit is the One who preserved every line of it uncut, for you, for a canteen, for two thousand years later.

He is softening it and He is not asking for an apology

Now the other half, and it matters, because the honest answer to bitterness is not that it is fine and you should keep it.

The hardness is not your friend. It is not a moral failing either. It is what happens to a person who has been under pressure for years and has kept getting up anyway, and it deserves to be treated the way you would treat a bad back after twenty two years of a driver's seat: as an injury, not as a character.

And it is being seen to. I will give you a new heart, God says, and I will take out the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). Look at whose hands are on the work. He does not ask the stone to soften itself first, and He does not ask for an apology for how it got hard, and He does not stand back until the person is presentable.

That new heart is yours, given in Christ and not earned in a good week, and the Holy Spirit is the One doing the softening from the inside while you sit in a plastic chair not feeling a thing.

Look at Elijah under the broom tree, asking to die. Heaven sends him bread and sleep, twice, and no correction at all (1 Kings 19:5 to 7). That is the God you are dealing with. He feeds the man who has had enough.