Carrying the Tin to the Trestle Table

Eighty yards from the gate to the tent, across grass, holding a tin flat in both hands, which is a way of walking that every woman in that village recognizes from a hundred yards off.

The cake tent is two trestles end to end and a sheet of plastic over the top of it, and there is an unspoken arrangement about which end the competition entries go on and which end is for the ordinary contributions, and nobody has ever written it down.

There is a woman with a clipboard who is completely in charge and everybody is glad of it. There is a boy who has been given the job of putting numbers on things and is doing it with tremendous seriousness. There is a dog under the table who has worked out that this is the best tent on the field.

She is coming across with a lemon one.

And here is what nobody there knows. She has had three good weeks. Three. Not perfect, but three weeks where the thing underneath has been quiet, and she has slept, and she has walked across fields with tins in her hands and been entirely in the afternoon.

And what she is doing, as she crosses, is bracing.

Because she is certain that it is coming back. It always comes back, and when it comes back she believes it will cancel out the three weeks, in the way a bad ending spoils a good film, and she has begun to hold the three weeks at arm's length so that losing them will cost less.

Let me say who I am speaking to. Today I am speaking to you, the one carrying what somebody else did. I am not going to ask you what it was, and nothing here wants the thing itself.

And I will say the hard true thing first: I am not going to promise you it does not come back. This message does not do that. What I am going to do is show you a verse that assumes it does.

The verse says when, not if

There is a sentence in Micah that ought to be far better known, and the grammar of it is the whole comfort.

Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.Micah 7:8

When I fall. Not if.

When I sit in darkness. Not if, and notice the verb, because it is not a stumble word. It is sitting. Being in it for a while. Settled in it, in the way a person is when something has come back and looks like staying.

Whoever is speaking there is not describing a life in which the falls have stopped. They are describing a life in which the falls happen, and are assumed, and are answered.

So the day you are bracing for is in the verse. It is written into it as an expected feature, and it is not treated as a catastrophe, and nothing anywhere in that sentence suggests it cancels anything.

You are held by a promise that already includes the day it comes back, and you were never being asked to keep it away. I am not softening anything. The written word uses when twice and if not at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it to a woman crossing eighty yards of grass with a tin in both hands.

A bad ending does not cancel a good film

Now let me take apart the arithmetic you have been doing, because it is not true arithmetic and it has been costing you the three weeks while you still have them.

You believe a return cancels what came before. That is how it feels, and it is how a great many things in life work, and it is not how this works.

Three good weeks happened. They are not a claim about the future and they were never a down payment on a cure. They were three weeks, and they were real, and if tomorrow is bad, the three weeks will still have happened, and nothing in heaven or earth can go back and unhappen them.

And the man in Micah says something even better than that. He does not say the darkness will be brief. He says the Lord will be a light to him in it. Not instead of it. In it.

You are given light inside the dark sitting itself, and you were never promised the sitting would be canceled. Scripture puts the light and the darkness in the same clause on purpose, and it is His Spirit, not a run of good weeks, who is the light in the middle of one.