The One You Would Still Shout

Tomas kept the card in the fold of his wallet where the notes go, and it had been in there so long that the lamination had gone soft and was peeling back at one corner like a thumbnail.

He had made it himself at thirty-one, on an afternoon when he had a good pen and a strong feeling. Nine lines. Nine things he would put his hand up for in any room, at any hour, in front of anybody. For most of two decades he was the man at the end of the meal who pushed his plate forward and said, right, go on then, let us talk about it properly, and people either loved him for it or looked for their coats.

Now he was sixty-two and sitting at a wedding reception at the table furthest from the band, which is where they put you when they run out of ideas.

There was chicken. There was a centerpiece made of eucalyptus and something spray painted gold. Across from him a man in a rented waistcoat, well meaning, half a glass in, leaned over the eucalyptus and started number four. Just like that. Opened it up the way you open a window, expecting the room to freshen.

And Tomas found he had nothing.

Not nothing to say. He knew every move of number four the way you know your own hallway in the dark. He could have taken it apart and put it back together while the band tuned up. He simply did not want to, and he could not manufacture wanting to, and he sat there smiling and nodding while the man in the waistcoat did all of it by himself and eventually ran out of road.

Later, when the dancing started, Tomas went out to the car for his wife's cardigan and did not come straight back.

He sat in the driver's seat with the door shut and the music going thump through the bodywork, and he took the card out. He put the interior light on. He read all nine.

Eight of them sat there like furniture in a house nobody lives in.

The ninth one, the last line, the one he had written smallest because he ran out of room at the bottom, went through him like a hand on the back of the neck. He read it once and his eyes stung. He read it again and put his hand flat on the steering wheel, and out there in a car park with the bass coming through the window, a sixty-two year old man said it out loud to nobody, and it came out louder than he meant it to.

Then he sat very still, because underneath the heat of it came the other thing, and the other thing was shame.

There used to be nine.

The card in the wallet, gone soft at the corners

Let us go straight at the shame, because the shame is the actual subject and the number is only where it is hiding.

You are not holding a report card in your hand. You are holding a list, and a list is not a soul. Paul wrote to Corinth that he determined not to know anything among them save Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and that is a man who could argue anything with anybody, deliberately putting eight things down on the table so his hands were free for one. The Holy Spirit had that written down as a strength. Not once as a shrinkage.

For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.1 Corinthians 2:2

Now, be honest with me and I will be honest with you. Paul's short list came by aim. Yours may have come by attrition, and that is a different road, and it feels nothing alike from the inside. His went short because he chose; yours went short while your back was turned, and you looked up one day and found the furniture gone.

Those are not the same journey and I will not pretend they are. What I am telling you is that God is not grading the route. Load bearing is load bearing. The beam does not become less of a beam because the extension fell off.

And there is a line still holding in you. You have one thing that gets a grown man out of a wedding, into a car, and shouting on his own in the dark, and that is not the residue of a faith. That is the fire under the whole thing. His word says the foundation of God stands sure, and the heat that came up in your chest at the last line on that card came off the same Spirit who laid it.

Notice what the eight things had actually been doing for you. They were not holding you up, they were describing you. They were how a room knew who you were within four minutes of you sitting down. Useful, and mostly true, and paid for with real thinking, but scaffolding is not a wall. You can take scaffolding away from a finished building all day long and the building does not notice.

You were never held up by the count. Not at thirty-one with the good pen, not at fifty, not tonight in the car park. His word never once puts a number on what a person must be prepared to argue in order to belong to Him, and the Holy Spirit has not been keeping a tally in a ledger somewhere and shaking His head as it came down.

Now let me say the other half, because a message that only says one half is a trick. A short list is not a virtue. Do not walk out of here proud of being down to one, as though the people at that reception with nine live things in them were carrying something worse. They are not. A long list is not a sin and a short list is not a badge, and I have no interest in getting you to trade one kind of self regard for another.

The only question on the table is whether what remains under you holds weight.

And I will not be handing you a list. That is not me being coy. It is the whole point. A list somebody else hands you cannot hold your weight, because you have never once leaned on it. The line at the bottom of that card did something to Tomas precisely because he found out, over thirty years, that it took his weight every time he put it down.

You are not required to reassemble anything tonight. Not the eight, not the man you were at thirty-one with a good pen and a strong feeling. What is written promises a foundation, not an inventory, and the Holy Spirit is at work on you in this hour whether or not you can produce a page of positions to prove it.