The Landing Light at Ten Past Ten

For three school years Nando came through his own front door at ten past ten at night, and the house was always in exactly the same condition.

Two pairs of shoes kicked off at the bottom of the stairs, one on its side. A plate on the side with a tea towel over it. The kitchen light off and the landing light on, always on, left on for him by his wife so he would not go up in the dark and wake anybody.

He would stand in the hall for a minute with his keys still in his hand, listening to a house that had already gone to bed without him.

Then he would eat standing up, and go up, and put his head round the door of the small room, and his son would be asleep with an arm hanging off the edge of the bed, and he would move the arm back and go to his own room and set an alarm for five.

That was Tuesday to Saturday for three school years.

The rota lived on the fridge door on a magnet shaped like a strawberry, and his wife wrote the school things on it in a different color so he could see them, and there is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from looking at a fridge and seeing a nativity play in green ink on a night you are booked.

In January it ended.

Nothing dramatic. What had needed covering stopped needing covering, on an ordinary weekday, and he came off the nights for good in the third week and the rota came off the fridge and the strawberry magnet went in the drawer.

He is home by six now.

And here is what nobody warned him about. His son is thirteen and does not want a story. His daughter is fifteen and is out most evenings and answers questions with one word, which is normal, which everybody keeps telling him is normal. The bedtimes he is home for are not happening any more, because the bedtimes finished while he was on the A4 with the radio on.

So he sits in the front room at half past eight with the whole evening in his hands and he does the sum.

Three school years. Call it four hundred and forty nights. He has actually worked it out, more than once, on the back of a delivery note, and he has never told a living soul that he has done it.

And underneath the sum is the sentence he has passed on himself, which he has also never said out loud, and which goes something like this.

I was not there. Now I am here and it is too late, and this is what I get.

That is the bit I want to talk about. Not the loss. The verdict he has attached to the loss.

Because here is where I stop talking about Nando, and you will already know whether this is your hallway. Maybe it was not bedtimes. Maybe it was your mother's last two years, or a friendship that went quiet while you were covering, or the fact that you have no photographs of yourself from that whole period because you were never in the room when anybody took one.

The hours are gone. That part is true and I am not going to soften it.

What is not true is the sentence you passed while you were counting them.

The court that is not sitting

Micah spends six and a half chapters on hard news. Corruption in the courts, a man's enemies in his own house, walls coming down. It is not a comfortable book and it does not end comfortably by getting cheerful. It ends with a question, and the question is thrown up at God like a man throwing his hands in the air.

Who is a God like You, pardoning wrongdoing and passing over the rebellion of the remnant of His inheritance? He does not hold His anger forever, because He delights in faithful love. He will turn and show tender compassion on us. He will subdue our wrongdoing. You will hurl all their sins into the depths of the sea.Micah 7:18-19

He does not hold His anger forever. Read that with your own hallway in mind, because the Holy Spirit is holding that line over a man who has been serving a term nobody sentenced him to. You are not under anger tonight, and there is no anger over those four hundred and forty nights for God to be holding in the first place.

Now sit inside the last picture for a second, because it is a physical one. Hurled into the depths of the sea. Not filed. Not suspended. Not kept in a drawer in case it is needed at a later hearing. Thrown into deep water by somebody with a strong arm, and Scripture chose that image on purpose, and the Spirit is the one making sure you cannot walk past it politely. You have deep water where you have been keeping a ledger.

And notice what the psalm of Micah does not do, because this is the part that matters most and it is the part religious people ruin.

It does not explain.

It gives no account of what the hard years were for. It does not tell the remnant that the walls came down to teach them something, or that the losses were a pruning, or that it will all make sense from a distance. Micah looks at what happened, and then looks at who God is, and puts the second thing over the first thing, and stops.

I am going to do the same and stop where he stops. Those nights were nights in a van. They were not a curriculum, they were not a correction, and they were not a bill being run up. I have no standing to tell you what they were for. Micah 7 tells you who was over them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a hallway at half past eight, and you were loved through every one of the four hundred and forty and you were loved on the ones where you did not think about God once.

That is not my opinion of your record. That is what the Spirit has been saying out of Micah 7 while you have been doing sums on the back of a delivery note. You are not in the dock. The court you have been appearing in for two years has never once been in session.