The Shutter Goes Up

The shutter sticks at the bottom left corner and it has stuck there for years. He puts his shoulder into it the way he has always put his shoulder into it, and it goes up, and the arcade smells of cold metal and last night's disinfectant.

He sets the bolts out first. Cotton lawn, then the poplins, then the heavy curtain stuff at the end where it can lean on itself. Buttons in the jars. Tape measure round his neck. Scissors in the tin where scissors live.

Two units along, the shutter that used to be a greengrocer has not gone up since the spring. The one opposite went dark before that, and there is a card in its window from the arcade office. Light comes through the roof panels and falls on a good deal of empty floor. It is a Tuesday, and Tuesdays are the quiet ones now.

The pitch rent does not know any of this. It arrives when it arrives, exactly as it arrived when this aisle was three deep on a Saturday and he could not hear himself think over the noise of it.

He squares the bolts so the selvedges line up, because he is a man who likes a thing squared off. Then he puts both hands flat on the counter and says good morning to God, out loud and quietly, the way he has said it at this counter for longer than the greengrocer was ever open.

A woman comes in for blackout lining for her spare room and he cuts it and rolls it and talks to her about her window. A man asks about a zip and then does not buy the zip. That is the morning.

At the end of the day he counts the tin. He does not need to count it. He counts it anyway, because he was raised to keep an honest record, and an honest record on a slow day is still an honest record. Then he pulls the shutter down and it sticks at the bottom left corner, and he puts his shoulder into it, and in the morning he will put his shoulder into it again.

And you know exactly what that is like, or you would not have opened this. So let us be honest about the name over this door before we go one step further.

Faith is not the thing that fills the arcade

I am going to say this plainly, because the other version has been handed to you for years and it has cost you something.

Faith does not remove poverty. It never did. There is no arrangement anywhere in Scripture where believing harder converts into an amount, and if somebody taught you there was, they were selling you something the Bible does not stock.

There is a second weight underneath the first one. It is heavier and it never gets said out loud. It is the suspicion that a proper believer, a real one, would have been out of this by now. That there is a key. That everybody else was handed it and it was never handed over to this counter.

I will not spend one gentle sentence on that suspicion. It is a lie, and it is not a small one, and it has been sitting in your chest for years dressed up as humility.

So hear this where you are, with both hands flat on your own counter. You are held right now by a God who has not been outbid by an empty aisle, and you have not slipped one line down His estimate of you since the footfall went. I am not handing you my opinion of your situation. Paul wrote it into the record in 2 Corinthians 4:8, pressed on every side and not crushed, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that sentence current in a market arcade rather than merely ancient.

Read the second half of that verse slowly, because the first half is the part everybody quotes and the second half is the part you came here for. Pressed. Not crushed. The man who wrote it did not pretend the pressure was absent in order to be counted faithful, and neither does anybody reading this.

What your faith is actually doing

It is not filling the arcade. Let us have that said out loud, and then let us look properly at what it is doing, because it is not nothing and it has been badly undervalued behind that counter for a long time.

It got the shutter up. It said good morning to God on a morning when the till had nothing whatsoever to say for itself. It is the reason nobody has concluded that God is a fiction, which is honestly the tidier position from where that counter stands.

I have spent my life around books and ledgers and I know the difference between a slow column and a dishonest one at a glance. What I am looking at here is not a failure of trust. It is trust doing the hardest thing trust is ever asked to do, which is to keep turning up with no receipt.

You have been holding on to God through a stretch that has loosened the grip of people with far easier lives, and the written word does not file that under small faith. It calls it endurance, and it calls the one who stays under it blessed (James 1:12), and the Spirit who has been holding you up in the middle of it is not standing over you with a red pen.

Nobody who has never had to count a tin like that gets an opinion on the state of your faith. And nobody, myself included, gets to tell you it is about to be repaid with a figure, because that is a promise no person on this earth was ever authorized to make.

A record is not a verdict

Here is the thing I know better than I know most things.

A set of books tells you what happened. That is the whole of its job and a good one does it beautifully. It says what came in and what went out and when, and it hides nothing, and that is precisely why an honest one is worth keeping on a slow day.

What a set of books cannot do, in any language, in any century, is tell you what a person is worth. There is no column for it. There never was one. Every time anybody has tried to read a worth off a balance, they have read something that was not written there.

The takings in that tin are a record of an aisle. They are not a report on a man.

You are worth what Christ paid, and that was settled somewhere else entirely and settled in full, and His Spirit is the one who bears witness to it inside you (Romans 8:16) on the mornings you cannot feel a thing about it. That is not a kind remark to cheer somebody up. It is an entry, and it stands in a book that nobody can get at.

And if this has come to the point of real danger, a home going or a family going without food, then reach for the help that exists and reach for it today, without one ounce of shame attached to the reaching. That is not faith failing. Faith has hands. Using them is what they are for.