Twenty past eleven and the shutter is down. He is out the back seeing to the fryer. She is wiping the counter with the cloth going in the same circles it has gone in for nine years, and the shop has started making its other noise, the one you only ever hear after closing: the fridge, and the meter clicking over in the cupboard by the back door.
The standing charge runs whether anybody comes in or not. It runs on the wet nights when the whole street stays home. It runs on the days they do not open at all. She has known that for nine years and tonight, for no reason she could name, it is the thing she cannot get past.
She says it out loud to an empty shop. It goes on whether we are here or not.
And then the second one arrives, and it is not about the meter at all. It comes up in her own voice, in her own mouth, and it says: I do not think You are coming.
He puts his head round the door drying his hands and asks what she said. She says nothing, love. And that is the first untrue thing she has ever said to him in this shop, and it frightens her more than the cupboard does.
She looks at the second fryer, the one they stopped running. The fat in it has gone solid in the cold, the way it does, a pale disc you could stand a spoon up in. It was liquid this time yesterday. Nobody did anything to it. It just went cold, and it set.
And you know exactly what that is a picture of, or you would not still be reading at this hour.
Nothing here is going to correct you
Let me get the first thing out of the way, because the brace is already up, and holding it all the way through costs more than the reading is worth.
There is no telling off in this. Not at the end either, not slipped in gently after some kindness, and not implied. I am not going to name what you said as the problem. I am not going to ask you to take it back or to feel differently about it before we can go on, and there is no point in the next fifteen minutes at which the tone changes.
You are met exactly as you are at twenty past eleven, hard bits and all. That is not my generosity, it is what the written word actually shows about God with people in your state, and the Holy Spirit did not bring you to this page in order to have a word with you.
The hardness is real. You did not imagine it. Something in you has gone stiff over nine years of the same arithmetic and you do not much like who you have become in it, and that dislike is not evidence against you, it is evidence that the soft one is still in there and still has an opinion.
Job said it out loud and God backed him
There is a man in the Bible who said the hardest sentences in the whole book, and he said them to God's face.
Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.Job 7:11
That is not a man having a wobble in private. That is a declared intention to stop being polite about it, written down and kept.
Now look at what happens at the end of the book. God turns to the three friends, the ones who had been carefully explaining, the ones who kept correcting the bitter man for his own good, and He says you have not spoken of Me what is right, as My servant Job has (Job 42:7).
Read that again with your cloth in your hand. The friends were the reasonable ones. The friends were the ones defending God. And the man God backs is the one who complained in the bitterness of his soul, and the Holy Spirit put both halves of that into the same book and left them there.
You have the same standing Job had, and it is not on loan and it is not conditional on your tone. Scripture puts a whole book beside a man who spoke to God bitterly and calls what he said right, and the same Spirit who kept that book in the collection is in the room with you at twenty past eleven.
What actually softens
Look back at the second fryer for a second, because the picture is doing real work.
That disc went solid because the shop went cold. Not because anybody did anything wrong to it. Not because it turned bad. It is exactly what it was, and the temperature changed around it, and it set.
And nobody gets it out with a chisel. You do not scrape hardness out of a thing like that. You put warmth to it, and it goes soft, and it moves again, and it never needed a lecture in between.
That is what is happening to you and it is not a metaphor I invented for your benefit. God says in His word that He gives a new heart and takes out the heart of stone, and it is described from beginning to end as something He does, with no clause anywhere requiring the person to soften themselves first (Ezekiel 36:26). This is yours right now, tonight, while the meter is still clicking, and it is the Holy Spirit doing the warming and not your own effort at feeling better.
He is not offended by how hard this has made you. He is not standing back until your voice improves. That is not the God who backed Job.
Say it to Him. The whole sentence. In the words it actually arrived in.
Not the version with the edges taken off. Not the version that starts with I know I shouldn't feel this way, because that is an apology in a coat and He did not ask you for one. The sentence you heard in your own voice at the counter, said out loud, to God, on purpose, once.
You have the standing to speak to Him like that, and it is not issued on the strength of how you have been coping. It is yours in Christ, the written word puts the bitterest speech in the Bible in the mouth of the man God vindicated, and the same Spirit who inspired that page is what makes your sentence a prayer rather than a swear.
And nothing here pretends to know what He will do about the meter. That is His. What is settled tonight is that saying it does not cost you Him, and it never did.
Declare this over yourself
Say these with the shutter down. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it is not issued on the strength of how well you have taken the last nine years. Scripture is the ground under every word of it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely brave. What God does about the money is His, however He answers, and nothing on this page pretends to know.
- Meter clicking in that cupboard, you run whether we are open or not and you have never once been the measure of me. Scripture holds a man who said he would not restrain his mouth but would speak in the anguish of his spirit (Job 7:11), and God did not silence him for it. In the name of Jesus I tell you what you are: a number in a cupboard, and the two of us are still a house that belongs to God.
- Fear that He has gone off me, you are reading a hardness that God is already warming and calling it a departure. The written word says the Lord told Job's friends that Job had spoken of Him what was right, and Job was the one who said it bitter (Job 42:7), and the Holy Spirit is softening what set solid in me without asking me to apologize for how it got that way. Get out of my shop, because there is only room in here for the two of us and Him.
- Lord, You are not offended by how hard this has made me, and You have never asked me to say sorry for it first. Job refused to restrain his mouth and You called what he said right (Job 42:7), and I thank You, because You have been warming this without one word of correction. I said the whole thing to You tonight, and I am still standing in my own shop.
Job 7:11
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