The Package Was Generous

Ray got the letter in March, and by the middle of April everything he had been afraid of was covered, and by June he had started going to a supermarket at eight in the morning for no reason.

The package was good. He will tell anybody that and he means it. Twenty-six years, a proper settlement, the pension protected, and enough that the house is not in question and will not be. His wife was braced for something much worse and it did not come.

The money question is closed. That is the honest state of it.

And Ray gets up at six because his body still does, and he is showered and dressed by seven, and then there is a Tuesday.

He has done the shed. He has done the guttering. He has read more in four months than in the previous fifteen years, and he did enjoy it. He has been to see two people he had been meaning to see for a decade.

And at about eight in the morning there is a thing in his chest that he has no word for, and he has started driving to a supermarket he does not need anything from, because at eight in the morning that is somewhere to be.

What got him was his old foreman, seventy-two now, retired nine years, who Ray called in on because he had said he would and had not. They sat in the man's front room and talked about the site and about people, and after about an hour the old man said, apropos of nothing, looking at the carpet: took me about two years. What nobody tells you is that they do not want you back. They still want you. It is not the same thing and it takes a long while to hear the difference.

They still want you. It is not the same thing.

Ray sat in a stranger's front room, more or less, and had to change the subject, and he could not have explained it to any man he ever worked with.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting there, had nothing to do with the settlement.

He thought: they covered everything I was afraid of and they did not touch the actual thing, and the actual thing is that for twenty-six years somebody needed me at eight in the morning.

Let me say the word properly first

Before anything else I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a man in a supermarket car park at ten past eight.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a settlement, not a protected pension. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something startling with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And let me be plain about something else before we go further. Nothing on this page suggests the money was a lesser gift or that you should have wanted less of it. A man with twenty-six years behind him and a mortgage in front of him was right to want it covered, and it was covered, and I am glad of it and so is God. The settlement was a real answer to a real problem and it worked.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to name the thing it did not even look at, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

You are already named in this. Scripture says it, and His Spirit is the one who says it to a person rather than about one.

Three questions on a beach, none of them about the job

There is a conversation at the end of John's Gospel between Jesus and a man who had very publicly stopped being what he was, and had gone back to fishing because it was the only thing left to do at eight in the morning.

Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? He said to him, Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. He said to him, Feed my lambs. He said to him a second time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? He said to him, Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. He said to him, Tend my sheep.John 21:15-17

Notice what is not asked.

He does not ask what happened. He does not ask him to account for the three denials, and He does not review the failure, and He does not ask him what his plan is now.

He asks about love, three times, which is not a job interview and is not a performance review either, and then He hands him something to do that has nothing to do with fish.

And notice where it happens. On a beach at breakfast time, after a night of work that produced nothing, which is the exact hour and the exact mood this article is written for.

You are not a weak man for eight o'clock. You are somebody who had a role that told him who he was every single morning for twenty-six years, and the written word does not scold anybody for missing that. It puts a question about love where the review would have gone, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading a beach story and getting through a Tuesday.

And here is what is true of you tomorrow morning, before you know one thing about what comes next. You are met where the money could not reach. His word has Him asking a finished man about love and then giving him something to do, present tense on the page, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a man rather than a passage he knows.

What the settlement did not touch

Think about what got you in that front room. It wasn't sympathy. That man has never offered anybody sympathy in his life.

It was: they still want you, it is not the same thing, and it takes a long while to hear the difference. It was somebody nine years ahead of you naming the exact thing, in the exact words, without being asked. You were starving to hear it named by a man who had been through it, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as self-pity, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the supermarket. It is not boredom and it is not money. It is that for twenty-six years being needed at eight in the morning was the answer to a question you never had to ask, and the package was never designed to cover that, which is not a failure of the package.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. There is a question waiting for you at breakfast time and it is not about your record. Jesus made a fire and cooked fish before He said a word to any of them, and He was in that front room while you were changing the subject.