Five Forty, Nineteen Years

Twenty to six and he lifts the shutter, and it makes the noise it has made since before his hands were this shape, and there is nobody on the street to hear it.

Dark, or the version of dark a street has when the lamps are still on and the sky has not decided anything yet. Cold on the metal. The shutter goes up in three pulls, the way it has always gone up in three pulls, and the third one is the one that takes something out of your shoulders.

Nineteen years.

The bread comes at ten past. The papers were dropped at half past four and are in a bundle by the door with the plastic strap that cuts your hand if you are impatient with it. He is never impatient with it. He has a key on his belt for the strap that his daughter had made for him as a joke and that he has used every single morning for eleven years.

He puts the lights on. The fridge does the thing it does. He fills the machine.

And what he thinks, standing there in the first two minutes before anybody comes, is not a thought exactly. It is more like a weather system that has been sitting over him for a couple of years now, and it says:

This is not going anywhere.

Not the shop, though the shop is fine, more or less. Him. Nineteen years of twenty to six and he is in the same place he was in, and the things he thought were coming did not come, and turning up has turned out not to be the same as getting anywhere.

At two minutes to six a woman knocks on the glass because she needs milk and cannot wait, and he lets her in, and he does not charge her the right amount, and she knows he does not, and neither of them says anything about it.

That is you, and your shutter might be a ward, a route, a classroom, a house, a person you get up for.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to keep turning up and taking it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

I am not going to rally you, by the way. That has been done to you before, from platforms, by people who meant well, and it made you tired in a new way. And I am not going to tell you it is nearly over, because I do not know that and neither does anybody who says it.

Paul finishes a huge chapter on one small clause

There is a chapter about the largest thing anybody has ever written about, and it ends on a sentence addressed to people doing ordinary work.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.1 Corinthians 15:58

Read the last clause and read who is doing the knowing.

Forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. He does not say it might not be. He does not say it will turn out to have been worth it, one day, if a man holds on. He states it as a thing already established and already available to be known, and he puts it at the end of a chapter about resurrection because that is the ground it is standing on.

And notice the two words before it: stedfast, unmoveable. Those are not words about distance covered. Nobody describes progress as unmoveable. They are words about a person still being in position.

You are standing in something already settled, and your labor is not in vain right now rather than eventually. That is not a lift for a tired man: 1 Corinthians 15:58 states the not being in vain as present fact and asks a man to know it rather than to achieve it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a settled thing hold in a body that has been getting up in the dark for nineteen years rather than the resolve anybody can find at five forty.

Standing is not stalling and it never was

Here is what a long stretch does to language, and it is worth pulling apart.

It takes the word standing and files it beside stuck, and after enough years a man cannot tell them apart. So nineteen years of turning up gets recorded, internally, as nineteen years of not moving, and both of those describe the same facts and only one of them is true.

Stalling is a vehicle that has stopped. Standing is a person on their feet at the end of a long day who has not gone down. One is an absence of movement. The other is the presence of somebody who is still there. And Paul asks for stedfast and unmoveable, which is the second one, named as the thing he actually wants.

You have been standing, and standing is the assignment rather than the consolation. The written word attaches one instruction to the whole armor and that instruction is stand, and the Spirit of God has been the one doing the holding through every one of the nineteen years, whether or not any of it felt like anything.

Notice what is not being said. Nobody is telling you the shop will grow, or that the things you thought were coming are still coming, or that this ends soon. Not one of those is on this page and none of them is mine to say.

You are upright this morning and that is not a small thing. Scripture calls a person who is still on their feet at the end of it standing, and His Spirit is what has kept a man's hand on a shutter at twenty to six.