The Car Started This Morning

The chairs in this waiting room are bolted to a rail, five in a run, so that when the man on the end shifts his weight everybody along the row feels him do it.

Ron is third along, with a folder flat on his knee. A plastic wallet, the paperwork from the course in it. The second course. He did the second one because the first one led nowhere and a man is supposed to keep trying.

He is fifty eight, he started work at sixteen, and there has not been a year since when he was not working.

He is not thinking about the appointment. He is doing the other thing, the thing he does, and he is doing it in a room full of strangers without moving his face. It starts with the car, because it always starts with the car. If the car goes then the shifts he can get to go with it, and then the rest of it follows in order, each one knocking over the next, all the way to the end.

He gets to the end. He always gets to the end. It is the same picture every time and he could tell you what room it happens in and what the light is like in there.

Then his number comes up on the screen, and the woman at the desk is quick and decent and not unkind, and eleven minutes later he is back on the pavement at half past ten in the morning with the whole day in front of him and nowhere at all to be.

Standing there doing his coat up, something ordinary catches him sideways. The car started this morning. First turn, cold as it was, the way it has every morning for weeks.

It is a true thing about today, and it is exactly the kind of true thing he stopped counting a long while ago.

You run the same sums, or you would not still be reading this, and you know precisely which room your own picture happens in.

Running it to the end is not unbelief

Let me name it accurately, because it usually gets named badly and the bad name does real damage.

The thing you do at eleven at night is not unbelief. It is not a failure of trust, it is not you letting something in, and it is not the reason your situation is what it is. Anybody who has suggested otherwise has added weight to a load that God did not put there.

It is arithmetic, and you happen to be good at it. It is what a responsible man does with a life that has nothing underneath it, and you run the numbers because the numbers are real and because nobody else in the house is going to run them. That part is not the problem.

Here is the problem, and it is a small one that has grown teeth. Somewhere around the third pass, the arithmetic stops being a calculation and turns into a rehearsal. A calculation finishes when you have the answer. A rehearsal gets performed, and then it wants performing again tomorrow, and it takes a real evening out of a real life every time it is staged.

So take this where you are sitting, before anything else is said. You are not a man of little faith for having done the sum. Scripture keeps a gray headed man saying out loud that he is afraid of being cast off when his strength fails (Psalm 71:9), and the Holy Spirit saw to it that the line stayed in the songbook of the house of God rather than being tidied out of it by somebody with a tidier theology.

What He put in writing about a man your age

Isaiah 46, and I want you to notice who it is addressed to before you notice anything else.

Hearken unto me, which are borne by me from the belly, which are carried from the womb: and even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:3 and 4

Most of the promises a person gets handed are addressed to everybody. This one goes out of its way to name an age. Hoar hairs. Gray. It was written with a man in his late fifties standing in the room, and it was written that way on purpose, because God knew which end of a working life the fear arrives at.

Now look at what is actually promised, because it matters that we do not make it say more than it says. He does not say the road smooths out. He does not say the fields come good or the work turns up. What He says is who will be underneath you on the road, and He puts His own arms in the sentence twice over: I will bear, I will carry.

So hear it where the day has left you. You are carried, and you have been carried since before you had a memory to keep any of it in. That is not my encouragement dressed up as doctrine, it is what God says of Himself in the written word, and His Spirit is the One who makes an old sentence land on a man doing his coat up outside a jobcentre at half past ten in the morning.

And notice the tense He uses, because a scribe cannot help noticing tenses. I have made, and I will bear. The making is finished and behind Him. You have a God who has already committed Himself, in writing, to the part of your life that has not happened yet, and the Holy Spirit is the guarantee of that commitment inside you (Ephesians 1:14) on the nights when the picture is running and you cannot make it stop.

Only the column in front of you

I spend my life with scrolls, and there is something in the handling of one that I would like you to have tonight.

A scroll is not a book. You cannot see the whole of it at once. It is unrolled to one column, and that column sits in front of the scribe on the table, and the rest of the roll stays wound on the other side, out of reach and out of sight. The whole text exists. Every word of it is there. But the hand only ever works on what has been unrolled.

No scribe has ever been asked to write on a part of the roll that is not in front of him. Ink will not go on rolled parchment, and nobody in the trade has ever been blamed for failing to put it there.

Tomorrow is wound up on the far side of the table. It exists, and God has read it, and it is not in front of your hand tonight.

Now, there is a difference between planning and rehearsing, and I am not asking you to give up the first one. Planning belongs to today's column. The call that can be made, the form that can be filled in, the person who can be asked, the thing that can actually be done between now and dark. That is real work and it is yours to do and nothing here tells you to stop doing it.

Rehearsing is trying to write on the rolled part. It produces nothing, it costs you a night, and it is the only kind of work that leaves a man more tired than the work does.

You have today's strength today. That is the arrangement, it is God's own and not my optimism, and the same Spirit who put I will carry you into Isaiah 46:4 is the one who has been carrying you through a stretch that would have finished a lot of men with easier arithmetic.