Cold Hands and Orange Segments

She has been holding the folding chair for twenty minutes and it has not occurred to her to open it.

Saturday morning, a pitch marked out slightly wrong so one corner flag is nearly in the hedge, twenty-odd parents along the touchline in the kind of cold that gets into the fingers first. Somebody's spaniel is doing laps. A man she vaguely knows is telling her about a hedge trimmer. Behind her a woman is cutting oranges into segments in a plastic tub because that is what somebody in this club has always done and nobody has ever suggested stopping.

Her daughter is playing at right back and doing that thing she does where she looks over to check.

Eleven days ago she sat in a chair with her coat on her lap and heard a sentence, and she cannot remember driving home. Since then she has been to work, changed the beds, sorted the recycling, and stood here at nine on a Saturday exactly as she has stood here for four seasons. Everything is where it was. The corner flag. The oranges. The spaniel. And absolutely nothing is where it was, and the gap between those two facts is what she is actually standing in this morning, holding an unopened chair.

Nobody here knows. She has not told them and does not intend to, not this week.

Maybe you are somewhere in that gap yourself. Perhaps yours was a phone call, or a conversation in which somebody you trusted turned out to be somebody else, or five years of a planned future that stopped existing in about ninety seconds. And you are getting on with it in public, capably, which is what makes the private part so strange: things you assumed would always be there are simply gone, and everybody around you is discussing a hedge trimmer.

I am not going to tell you what it is for

Let me clear the ground before I put anything on it.

I do not know why this happened to you. I am not going to tell you it was sent, or that it is a lesson, or a pruning, or a refining, or that it will all make sense to you in hindsight. I do not know that and neither does anybody else who writes these things, and a person eleven days into it does not need somebody handing them a purpose for their own catastrophe.

I am also not going to audit what you have left. That is the other thing people do at this point, usually kindly, and it is unbearable: the list of what is still good, delivered to somebody who did not ask for a stocktake. You are allowed to be as far into this as you are.

You are not being asked to be further along than you are, and nothing about where you stand with God changes with how badly you are doing. Scripture has whole books of people saying exactly what you would say if you were allowed, and the Holy Spirit is the One who stays in the room with a person who has nothing polite left.

What was actually underneath

Here is what I do want to put in front of you, and it is one thing, not a list.

Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.Hebrews 12:28

Notice the tense of the receiving. It is happening now, in the present, while everything else is moving. Not a kingdom you will one day be given if this goes well. One you are receiving today, on a touchline, in the cold, holding a chair you have not opened.

And notice what is said about it: it cannot be shaken. Not that it is unlikely to be. Not that it has held up well so far. It is of a kind that shaking does not reach, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a present fact in a person rather than a doctrine on a page.

You have not lost the thing that was actually holding you, because it was never among the things that could go. That is what the written word says about the kingdom you are in, and the Holy Spirit is the deposit of it, given to you in advance so that a person can know what they have while the rest of the picture is still coming down.

I want to be careful here, because this verse gets used badly. Somebody will tell you that the shaking came in order to show you what is unshakeable. I am not saying that. I do not know why it came, and I would not dress up your loss as a teaching aid. What I am saying is much simpler and much sturdier: whatever the shaking was, it did not reach the kingdom, and the kingdom is what you are in.

You are inside something the last eleven days did not touch, and you were inside it before the phone rang. Hebrews 12:28 puts the receiving in the present tense on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is given as the down payment on it so that a person can know what they hold while the rest is still coming apart in their hands.

What is still true this morning

So let us be concrete, because a general comfort is no use at nine on a Saturday.

Something is still true this morning. Not a list of things. One. God has not moved. He was not startled eleven days ago and He did not have to reorganize anything. He is not further away this week than He was the week before, and the sense that He is further away is not a measurement, it is the weather.

You are held by a God who was not shaken when your ground was, and He is nearer to this than the news is. Scripture puts His steadiness underneath everything that moves, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a place a person can actually stand rather than a proposition they agree with.

And the other true thing, which is nearly the same one: this is not a verdict on you. You have not been unsteady because you are short of something. Anybody standing where you are standing would be unsteady, and the tremor in you is not being marked. Nobody is grading your response to the worst eleven days of your life.