The Appointment At Forty-One

It took nine minutes and Sami still has the parking ticket.

He does not know why he kept it. It was in his coat pocket and then it was in the dish by the door and then it was in a drawer, and it is still in the drawer, and he could not tell you what it is for.

Nine minutes. A small room with a window that did not open. A woman doing her job well and kindly, who had clearly done this many times and had not become careless about it, which he noticed even then and was grateful for even then.

He was forty-one.

And what he has never been able to explain to anybody is not the fear. Everybody understands the fear and people are good about it. It is the other thing.

The world did not change. That is the thing. He walked out and the car park was the same car park and a man was arguing with the machine about a coin, and Sami stood there holding a ticket in a world that had gone on being completely ordinary.

He drove home. He put the bins out that night because it was Tuesday.

That was two years ago and it is still like that. He does the shopping. He watches things. He has opinions about the football. And all of it now happens in a slightly different world that nobody else can see, and the strangest part of the whole business is how normal it looks from the outside.

He has stopped saying the word to people because of what happens to their faces.

And at about four in the morning, which is his hour, the thing that arrives is not a question about why. He has never much gone in for why.

It is simpler and worse than that.

Nobody asked me. And I am in here on my own.

You may know a version of that room and that car park.

Maybe yours was a phone call. Maybe it was a form of words used by somebody trying to be gentle. Maybe there was no room at all, just a slow accumulation, and one morning you understood that you were living somewhere else now.

Everything I am not going to say

Let me clear the room, because you have had a lot of people in it and some of them left things behind.

I am not going to tell you God sent this. I do not believe it, I will not write it, and if somebody has said it to you in the last two years then I am sorry and they were wrong to.

I am not going to tell you there is a lesson in it. I am not going to ask you what you think you are meant to be learning, or what it might be teaching you, or how you might grow. That question, put to somebody who is actually in it, is a small cruelty in good clothes and you owe nobody an answer to it.

I am not going to tell you it is good, or that it will make sense later, or that anything about the last two years was a gift with difficult wrapping. It is not good. If a message about this makes the thing sound lovely, it has failed you.

And I am not going to promise you an outcome. I do not know what happens next and neither does anybody writing anything anywhere.

I have one thing to say and it is small and it is not nothing.

The clause in the middle

There is a line everybody knows, and the whole weight of it sits in four words at the end that people tend to walk past.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.Psalm 23:4

For thou art with me.

Notice what he does not say. He does not say the valley is good. He does not say he understands why the valley. He does not say the valley is short, and he does not say he is going to come out the other side, and the psalm makes no claim at all about the geography.

He gives a reason for one thing only, and the reason is a location. Thou art with me. Not near. Not watching. With, in the valley, in the shadow, on the path.

And He is in this with you and the claim is not larger than that. The written word gives no explanation of the valley and one fact about the company, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man awake at four in the morning.

And you are not in there on your own. The word puts the with as the ground of the fearing-no-evil rather than any statement about the terrain, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit in a room with a window that does not open.

He does not do outside

Here is the one thing I want to press, because I think it is the whole of what I have.

There is a pattern in how He operates and it is the most consistent thing about Him. At every point in the story where He could have called something in from the edge, He came inside instead.

Into a body. Into a family in an occupied country. Into a boat in weather. Into a house where somebody had just died, four days late, and He cried when He got there.

That is not a God who stands at the door of a thing you did not choose and shouts encouragement over the noise.

And He came in rather than calling in. The word says the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, which is a sentence about coming inside, and the Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than theological to a man putting the bins out on a Tuesday.

And nothing here is on you to hold. The word says casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you, and the Spirit is the one who makes a handing over real rather than a phrase, in the hour when nobody else is awake.

The world going on being ordinary

One more, because I think this is the part nobody addresses.

The car park was the same car park. The man was arguing about a coin.

That has felt like abandonment and I want to name why it is not, without pretending it does not feel like it.

The world going on is not the world failing to notice. It is what a world does. And in the middle of that ordinary car park, in a coat with a ticket in the pocket, there was already somebody with you who did not need to be informed of what had happened in the room, because He had been in the room.

And He was in that room and He is in the drawer and He is in the four o'clock hour. The word says whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about location rather than a comfort about mood.