She Still Knows the Register by Heart

The meeting was at eleven forty and it took eleven minutes.

There was a slide. There was the word restructure, and then the word consolidation, and then somebody from outside the building said we recognize this is difficult news, and a man at the back asked a question about timelines that nobody really answered. Then everybody went to lunch, because the timetable does not care what happened at eleven forty.

She taught period five. She taught it properly. Then the bell went, and the corridor emptied the way it always does, in about four minutes, and then it was four in the afternoon and she was standing in room nineteen on her own.

The chairs are up on the desks. There is a laminated display of irregular verbs on the back wall that she made on a Sunday three years ago, half of it already peeling at one corner. There is a box on the front desk that somebody left there, flat packed, not even opened. There is a mug with a chip in the handle. The radiator is ticking.

And standing there, without meaning to, she says the register.

All of it. In order. Thirty-one names, first to last, the way she has said them at nine o'clock every morning since September, including the boy who left in February and the girl whose name everybody gets wrong except her.

She gets every one of them right.

Then she stops, because there is nobody to answer, and the room is very quiet, and the light is coming in low across the desks the way it does at four o'clock in that particular half of the year.

That is you.

Maybe it was not a classroom. Maybe it was a ward that closed, a firm that folded, a shop with brown paper going up in the window, a role that got merged out of existence in a call with the camera off. Maybe you spent nine years building something and it took a slide and eleven minutes.

Two things before we go any further, and I mean both of them.

Nobody is going to tell you that this was for the best. Not here. Not the pruning, not the season, not one word about God closing doors, and no explanation at all, because I do not have one and the ones people hand out are worse than silence. And you are not going to be asked to make a list of what you still have. That list is not comfort. It is an audit, and nobody audits a person on the afternoon it happens.

Peter is not saying it did not matter

There is a line in Peter that gets quoted badly, and I want to hand it back to you the right way round.

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.1 Peter 1:24-25

People use that to tell somebody their loss was small. Look at it again. He calls it glory. The flower of the grass is the beautiful part, the part worth looking at, and Peter does not say it was nothing. He says it withered. Withering is a real event that happens to a real flower, and a person who has watched it happen is not being melodramatic.

He is not measuring your department against eternity and telling you it comes up short. He is telling you what kind of thing you are standing on now.

You have not lost the thing that was actually holding you. That is not a nice sentiment on a bad afternoon. 1 Peter 1:25 says the word of the Lord stands after the field has gone brown, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence like that carry actual weight in a woman standing in an empty classroom rather than sounding like something on a card.

Notice what the passage does with your feet. It never asks you to prove that the grass did not matter to you. It puts one thing in the world that is of a different kind altogether, and it puts your weight on that.

You are standing on something that was never made of the timetable, and it is under you at four o'clock this afternoon. Scripture calls that word living and enduring in the same breath (1 Peter 1:23), and the Spirit of God is the one who carries it into a person rather than leaving it on a page.

And the register. Thirty-one names in order, and you got them right.

You were given the thing that made you learn those names, and the giving of it was real. James says every good gift comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation (James 1:17), and the same Spirit who put that love of people in you is not on the payroll of the organization that has just restructured itself.

Nobody is taking an inventory this afternoon

Somebody will tell you within a week to count your blessings. They will mean it kindly and they will be wrong about the timing, and you are allowed to let it go past you.

You have not been asked to be grateful today. The written word gives whole psalms to people in the middle of loss who are not grateful yet, and never once suggests they are behind schedule, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter rather than the auditor.

You are also not required to find the reason. Not the lesson, not the silver lining, not the thing God was apparently teaching you through a spreadsheet. You are not standing under a verdict this afternoon, whatever the quiet in that room sounds like. Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, full stop, on good days and on the day the department went, and it is the Spirit who is described as bearing witness with our spirit about whose we are.

You have something in you that no meeting created, which means no meeting is able to dissolve it. That is the whole force of enduring for ever in 1 Peter 1:25, and His Spirit is the deposit on it, already paid, already in you, and not subject to review.