Nine Stamps Out of Ten

The card is in the zip pocket of Bethan's purse, behind the library ticket, and it has nine stamps on it.

Ten gets you a free one. The stamps are little green coffee beans and the girl behind the counter used to do two if you were getting one for somebody else, which happened most weeks, because that was the arrangement. Five of them, every Friday, twenty past nine, the corner table by the window with the wobbly leg that Steph always fixed with a folded serviette.

Cai went into hospital on a Tuesday in the March.

For about three weeks the phone did not stop. Lasagne on the step. Jo drove her mother-in-law to the station without being asked. Ani sent a voice note every single night at ten past nine, and Bethan listened to them in the parents' room with one earphone in.

Then it went quiet. Not all at once, and nobody decided anything. The voice notes got shorter and then they got further apart and then there was a long one in the May that Bethan opened and meant to answer and did not, because that was the week of the second procedure, and by the time she surfaced it seemed strange to reply to something three weeks old.

Cai was discharged in the August. He went back in September. He plays football now, badly and constantly, and last week he told her a joke about a horse that took four minutes and had no ending.

He is fine. Everybody says so. He is fine.

It has been fourteen months and nobody has rung.

She sees them at the gate. They are lovely. There are hugs and there is how are you and there is we must catch up, and there is a way that a person says we must catch up that means it warmly and does not mean it as a plan.

So she has spent fourteen months working out what she did.

It was the message in the May. Or it was that she canceled Steph's fortieth and never sent anything. Or it was that she was too much in those first three weeks, all that need, all that thanking people. Or it was that she was not enough, that she never asked one of them a single question about their own life for a whole year, which is true, and which she has thought about at three in the morning more times than she would tell anybody.

She has been over it the way you go over a room you have lost an earring in. On her knees. Under things.

And the card stays in the zip pocket, nine out of ten, and she does not throw it away and she does not go in.

I want to be careful with you here, because you already know why you clicked on this.

It might not be a café. It might be five-a-side on a Thursday. It might be a group chat you are still technically in. It might be a whole family who were at everything and now send a card at Christmas.

And if you are reading this from inside it, with the ward round still to come and no fourteen months yet because it has not finished, put this down. There is nothing here you need today.

The list, and the one thing that is not on it

Here is a man in a prison writing out a list, and he is not being poetic. He is stacking categories the way a lawyer stacks them, to close every door in the building.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, neither things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:38-39

Read the second item in the middle of that. Things present.

Romans 8:38 put things present on the list long before either of us got here. Not things that make sense. Not things anybody has explained. A phone that stopped ringing in the May is a thing present, and it went into the list already covered, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over a woman at a school gate hearing we must catch up for the ninth time. You are not separated from the love of God this morning. Not by an inch, and not by fourteen months.

Now, before I go one line further, something has to be said plainly, and then I am not going to touch it again.

I am not going to tell you what happened to those Fridays. I do not know. Nobody who tells you they know is telling you the truth, and I am certainly not going to hand you a tidy explanation and call it comfort.

And I am not going to tell you it was for something. It was not. Nothing was being taken out of your life on purpose in that March, nobody was being removed from you to teach you a lesson, and your son was not ill in order to show you who your real friends were. That sentence gets said in kitchens by people who mean well and it is not true and I will not repeat it.

What I can do is tell you what it is not.

I have no standing to close your file. Romans 8:39 has the standing, and it closes it by naming every category there is and finding yours already inside, and His Spirit is what turns that from a verse on a page into something that lands on a Tuesday. You have no case to answer. There is no prosecutor. You have been running a fourteen month trial in an empty room.

What the psalm does not do

There is a line in Psalm 27 that I want you to notice for what it leaves out.

Though my father and my mother abandon me, the Lord gathers me in.

Look at how little the psalmist explains. He does not say why they went. He does not work out what he did to lose them, he does not defend them, and he does not accuse them either. He names the thing, flatly, and then he says what God does next, and that is the whole verse.

Gathers is a word with arms in it. It is what you do with washing off a line before rain, quickly, close to the chest, nothing left out there. The Spirit has been doing that with you since the March, out of a sentence that is written down and does not depend on how you feel about it on a given Friday. You are gathered, present tense, this morning, in a kitchen with a purse on the worktop.

You have been told, kindly, by people who love you, that everything happens for a reason. Every one of them was reaching for something to give you. But Romans 8 does not hand out reasons, it shuts doors, and the Spirit is not in the business of explaining your Fridays to you. You are loved without an explanation attached to it, and there was never a version of this where you had to earn one.