The Film I Have Never Seen the End Of

There is a film she has started eleven times.

She knows it is eleven because she is the sort of person who knows. She could tell you the first line, the name of the horse, the bit near the middle where the light goes gold across a field and something in her chest comes unstuck for a second and a half.

She has never seen the last twenty minutes.

It goes like this. The lamp on, not the big light. The fire, if it is that kind of evening. A blanket over the knees, because her feet have been cold since the spring and nobody has ever explained why. A bowl of something on the arm of the chair. And it is good. It is genuinely good, the way an ordinary Tuesday can be good when there is nothing in the diary and nobody needs anything from you.

Then, at about nine, she notices.

That is the whole mechanism, and it takes about a second. She notices that she is enjoying it. And the noticing is the end of it, because a woman who is enjoying herself is a woman who is not paying attention, and she has been paying attention for two years and it is not a thing you put down by deciding to.

So she stands up.

She puts a wash on. At five past nine, on a Tuesday, one towel and a tea cloth, for no reason any person on this earth could defend. Or she wipes a worktop that is clean. Or she goes and looks at the back door, which is locked, because she locked it, and she knows she locked it.

And then she comes back and the film is a different thing, because now she is a person standing behind a chair with a cloth in her hand, and a person standing up is not being caught out by anything.

She could look up how it ends. She has thought about it. But she does not want to know how it ends, she wants to be in it when it ends, and those are not the same wish, and she cannot say either of them out loud without sounding like somebody who needs a talking to.

She has said nothing to anybody. Everybody is so glad. That is the trouble with it. Everything is fine, she is well, the letter said what it said, and there is no sentence available to her that begins with I am frightened of a Tuesday evening.

That is you, is it not.

Perhaps not a film. Perhaps you get out of the bath while it is still hot. Perhaps you put the good mug back and take the chipped one, or you add so far to the end of every good sentence, or you have not once let a whole weekend be a whole weekend. Nothing is wrong. That is exactly what makes it so hard to say. Nothing is wrong, and you are ready.

Nobody is keeping score of your evening

I want to say first that I know why you get up, and it is not silliness.

Two years of watching taught your body an actual rule: whenever it went quiet, that was when the phone rang. Nothing about that is superstition. It is a pattern a nervous system learned honestly, in real time, from real evenings, and it has never once been told that the rule has expired. So please do not read a word of this as me tutting at a woman with a cloth in her hand at five past nine. I would have been standing up too.

But I do want to show you where the good is being kept, because I think you believe it is being kept in the evening. And if it were, then yes, spending it would be a risk, and rationing it would be sensible, and you would be doing the shrewd thing.

The Spirit is not coaxing you into a better mood tonight. He is reading you a line from Psalm 31:19, which says God's goodness is stored up, and you are not the one holding the store. It sits with Him, it was filled before this evening arrived, and no ordinary Tuesday spends it.

How great is Your goodness that You have stored up for those who fear You, that You have worked for those who take shelter in You, before the sons of men.Psalm 31:19

Stored up. Sit with that verb for a moment, because it is doing all the work.

A store is not weather. Weather is what you get and it changes and nobody manages it. A store is a thing somebody else has filled, deliberately, ahead of time, and it stays full whatever the sky is doing. David does not say God's goodness is issued daily according to conduct. He says it is stored, and the storing was finished before he wrote the sentence down. You are not the keeper of that store and you never have been, and the Holy Spirit is holding that written line out to a woman on the edge of an armchair who is calculating what she can afford to feel.

Now here is the part I most want you to have.

David wrote that psalm from inside a besieged city. He says so a couple of lines later. He was not a man reporting that the danger had lifted, and he was not enjoying a settled year with everything fine. He was inside the thing, and he still called God's goodness great, and he still called it stored. So Scripture has already ruled on your worry, and the Spirit is not asking you to wait for a safer week before you believe it: gladness in a person has never once been what summoned the trouble. You are inside a promise that a man wrote down with an army camped outside his wall, which means it was never a promise about the wall.

You have been told by somebody, probably kindly, that you should try to enjoy things more now. I understand what they meant and it is not what the word says. The written promise is not that your evenings improve. It is that the goodness is stored with Him and the shelter is a Person, and His Spirit is the one making that land in a front room at nine o'clock, where you have been trying to be a good enough guard of a season you never had the keys to.

I am not telling you nothing goes wrong. I am not making that promise and nobody honest will make it to you. If something in your body worries you, ring the people who look after you, this week, and do not apologize for it. What I am telling you is that the twenty minutes at the end of a film is not a hostage, and letting yourself be in it does not draw anything down on your head. You have been rationing on a theory nobody ever gave you, and the word underneath it is not a theory at all.