The Graduation in July

Ray fits kitchens. He is out of the house by ten past seven most mornings, and the van smells of sawdust and the coffee he buys at the same garage on the same road.

The first thing he does, before the key goes in the ignition, is look at the number on his phone.

Two thousand, two hundred and forty seven.

He does not celebrate it. He has never told anybody about it, not even the two people who would cry. He looks at it the way a man checks a mooring rope, then the phone goes in the door pocket and he drives.

That number is not nothing, and I want that said before anything else in this message, because everything after it depends on you knowing that I understand what it cost. Every one of those days was carried. Some of them were carried the way you carry a wardrobe up a staircase on your own, in the dark, with nobody at the other end. Nobody handed Ray that number. He has it because he got up.

Clipped to the vent on the dashboard there is a small calendar, the sort a builders' merchant gives away at Christmas with their phone number down the side. It is on the right month. It is always on the right month. It has never once been turned forward.

In March his daughter Bethan rang him. She graduates on the ninth of July. There are two tickets, and she wants him to have one.

He said, "Ask me nearer the time."

She left a little gap on the phone, the kind you can hear.

Then she said, "Dad. It is a date. It is not a test."

He said something about work, and about the summer being busy, and they talked about her flat and about the trains, and afterwards he sat in the van in the supermarket car park with the engine off for eleven minutes.

Here is what he could not explain to her, and what he could not really explain to himself either.

He was not frightened of the ninth of July. He was not sitting there thinking about a bar, or about the wedding four years ago, or about anything you could put in a leaflet. On that afternoon, in that car park, he was in no danger whatsoever.

He was frightened of being a man who had written something down for July.

Because a written date makes a claim about you. It says you expect to be here, and to be yourself, and to be well enough to sit in a hall in a jacket and clap until your hands sting. Ray does not know how to say that. He knows how to say today. He has said today two thousand, two hundred and forty seven times, he can say it again tomorrow, and nobody in this message is going to ask him to stop.

He has just never once planned a year.

And this is where I stop talking about Ray.

You know what your July is. It might be a wedding. It might be a course that starts in September, or a dog, or a spare room somebody keeps mentioning in a voice that is trying very hard not to push. It might be nothing bigger than the fact that you still buy the small bag of coffee.

Everybody can see that you can hold today. That was never in question.

It is the ninth of July you cannot pick up.

He came out wrapped

Nobody standing outside that tomb at Bethany thought the man was still dead.

They had just watched him walk out of a hole in a rock. Feet bound, hands bound, his face wrapped in a cloth, moving like a man in a sack, and every person in that crowd knew exactly what they had seen. He was alive. That was settled at the mouth of the tomb, before a single knot was untied.

The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, "Unbind him, and let him go."John 11:44

Read the order of it. Out first. Wrapped still. Loosed afterwards.

You are out. That is not encouragement I am offering you, it is the sequence John 11:44 lays down on the page, and the Holy Spirit has been saying the first half of it over you for years now without once making the second half a condition of the first. The linen did not mean Lazarus was still in the tomb. The linen meant he had been.

So a calendar that never turns forward is not evidence against you. It is linen.

I have no standing to tell a man who has carried two thousand mornings what he may write in a diary. Colossians 2:6 has that standing: as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him. Walk is a word with a direction inside it and a distance inside it, and you have been given the walking and not only the standing still, because His Spirit is what moves a man's feet inside a sentence like that one.

And notice who does the unbinding at Bethany. Jesus does not do it. He turns to the people standing there and tells them to, which means a man's arms were unwrapped in public, in front of the whole village, by somebody's aunt. You were never meant to get the wrappings off on your own in a van in a car park, and that is not my opinion about community, it is what John 11 actually describes and what His Spirit keeps quietly arranging. Sometimes He arranges it as a daughter on the phone saying, Dad, it is a date, it is not a test.

You have been told, gently, by people who love you and by people who were right, to take it one day at a time, and nothing in this message takes today off you. But Psalm 40:2 says He drew a man up out of the pit and out of the miry clay and set his feet upon a rock, making his steps firm. Steps is a plural. The Spirit did not make your steps firm so that you would stand still on them.

Somewhere in the sixth year, a sentence that saved your life quietly became a sentence about what you are, rather than a sentence about how a Tuesday gets crossed. Philippians 1:6 speaks of a good work already begun and already promised its finish, and it is careful to name who does the finishing. You are not a stay of execution. You are a good work in the hands of the One who started it, and the Spirit in you is the seal on it, not your streak.

So something small and specific is happening in you while you read this, and it stands on one line spoken outside a grave: loose him, and let him go. You have permission to plan. Not a duty to plan, not a target, not a date by which you ought to have booked something. Permission, which is a thing that has to be handed over by somebody with the standing to hand it, and the word of God has already handed it, and His Spirit is holding it out.