The Man Who Signed the Statement

Ten past seven, and he is parked across the road from a gate he has come through every working morning for six years.

His hard hat is in the footwell on the passenger side, where it has always lived. He put it there out of habit at ten to seven this morning and then remembered, sitting at the lights, that there is now no reason for it to be in the car at all.

The code on the gate has been changed. He knows this because he tried it on Monday, standing there like a man locked out of his own house, punching in four numbers that used to work, twice, while a kid in a security jacket watched him from the hut and then came out and said, very politely, that his name was on a list.

From here he can see the tower crane. He wrote the lift schedule for that crane. He can see the second floor, where the block work is going up in the wrong order, and he knows exactly which two calls he would be making about it right now if he were still allowed on the other side of that fence.

And he can see a man in a white hard hat walking the second floor with a tablet under his arm.

Nine years ago that man could not read a drawing. He could not, and there is no unkindness in saying so, because nobody can at nineteen. He was shown how. On the tailgate of a truck, with a pencil, over about four months, by the man now sitting in a parked car across the road.

There is a statement with that man's signature at the bottom of it. Four pages. It says things about the third of March that did not happen, and it uses the phrase "concerns raised on a number of occasions", and no such concerns were ever raised, not once, not by anybody.

He has read it eleven times. He has read it looking for the sentence that would make it make sense, and there is no such sentence in it.

And the signature at the end is the same loopy signature he watched a nineteen year old practice four or five times on the back of a delivery note, laughing, trying to make it look like a proper one.

That is the part that is actually taking him apart. Not the job.

You know this gate, and yours might have nothing to do with a building site. It might be an email chain. It might be a church meeting where three people you had been in a small group with for eleven years looked at the floor. It might be a family member's version of an afternoon you were both present at, told with such confidence that for one horrible minute you wondered whether you had remembered it wrong.

Before anything else. Nobody is going to tell you that you should have seen it coming, because there is no version of trusting a man for nine years that also involves suspecting him for nine years, and the thing you did was not naive. It was how a man builds anything with anyone.

And I am not going to explain to you what this happened for. I do not know. There is a kind of comfort that arrives holding a reason, and it is not comfort.

What the psalm puts side by side

The verse under this message is one line, and it is doing something very specific, and you have to see what sits immediately before it.

The psalm opens with a man saying that the faithful have vanished, that people speak with flattery, and that they talk with a double heart, which is a very old way of saying that the words coming out do not match what is behind them. That is the complaint. That is the whole first half.

And then:

The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.Psalm 12:6

Two kinds of words, laid side by side on purpose.

There are words that are smooth. Signed, even. Confident, four pages long, formatted properly. And there are words that have been through fire seven times, which is the ancient way of saying they came out the other side of a test that would have shown up anything false in them.

You are not being asked to trust the same way you trusted on the third of March, and nothing in Scripture asks a hurt man to pretend nothing happened. Psalm 12 puts a man's flattering words and God's tested words in two different categories in the space of six verses, and the Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of truth, which is a title that only means anything in a world where words can lie. God is not offering you a better version of what that man was. He is offering you a different kind of thing altogether.

The instrument that broke

Here is what I think actually broke this week, and it is not your faith.

Your instrument broke. The thing in a man that reads other men, the thing you've used on every hire, every quote, every handshake for twenty years, has just been shown to be wrong in the one place you would have bet the house.

So now every voice sounds like a possible statement. Including, if we are honest, God's.

You have not been disqualified from hearing God because a man lied about you on paper. What is written says His words are tried silver, which is a claim about the words and not about the ears receiving them, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries the word into a man rather than the man's own confidence in his judgment. The reading is not on you.

Sit with that, because everything in you this week wants to make trust into a skill you failed at.

You were not the fool in that story and you are not the fool sitting in that car. Scripture is full of men who were betrayed by people they had trained and fed and traveled with, and it never once turns and blames them for the trusting, and the Spirit of God is described as the one who bears witness with our spirit about who we are, which He is doing this morning whether or not anything in your chest is cooperating.

I am not going to tell you to forgive him today. That is not what today is for. Today is for being comforted, and a man who is told to forgive before he has been comforted learns that his pain was an inconvenience.