The Phone Face Up on the Counter

Esme had a good week in July and she has not told a single person about it.

Monday nothing happened at all, which after the year she has had is its own event. Tuesday her son rang for no reason. Not about arrangements, not about anybody's birthday. He just rang, and they talked about a program, and he laughed twice.

Wednesday she bought tulips.

Thursday somebody she had not heard from since it all started sent her a photograph of the two of them at a wedding, with no message attached, and then eleven minutes later a second one with nothing in it but an exclamation mark. Friday she slept until twenty past seven, which she has not done since the spring.

That is the week. Written down it looks like nothing. She would be mortified if anybody read it back to her, because it is a phone call, some flowers and a lie in.

Here is the part that is actually happening in that kitchen.

The tulips stayed in their paper on the side for two days. She walked past them on the Wednesday evening and looked at them and did not get a vase out, and on the Thursday she moved them along the worktop to wipe underneath and put them back down in the paper, and she could not have told you why.

And the phone stays face up.

Screen upward, on the counter by the kettle, all day, every day. She turns it over when she cleans the surface and turns it straight back. It is not that she is expecting a call. Nobody has anything to say to her now; that is rather the point, and the whole thing was cleared in April and everybody moved on by about the end of May. She is on month eleven and counting on her own.

It is that if it is going to light up, she wants to see it happen. She does not want to find it. Finding it is what happened last time, at half past nine on a Tuesday night, and she has organized the surfaces of her house around never being ambushed like that again.

So there is a good week going on in a house where the woman is standing slightly to one side of it, arms folded, watching the door.

And on the Friday, with the flowers still in their paper, she caught herself thinking a thing she would never say out loud: that it would almost be easier if something went wrong now, so she could stop bracing and get on with it.

The light that does not move

Take James 1:17 and hold it up against your Thursday, and notice first what it does not do.

It does not promise the Thursday. There is not one word in it about how long a good week runs, and any preacher who tells you otherwise has added something. What it says is this: every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights. So the tulips on the side came down. You are receiving from Someone rather than being dealt a hand off a deck, and the Spirit who put that sentence into James is not in the business of baiting people with flowers.

Now look at the second half of the verse, because the second half is written for you specifically.

With whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. That is sky language. A shadow moves because the light source moves; you can watch the shadow of a washing line travel across a garden all afternoon, and the reason it travels is that the sun is going over. James takes that ordinary fact and says the Father of lights has no such motion in Him. Nothing in Him turns, so nothing in Him casts a shadow that comes creeping across your kitchen at half past nine at night. You are standing under a light with no turn in it, and that is not a poetic flourish, it is what is written, and His Spirit is the one making it hold weight at the exact hour you brace.

Somebody has probably told you to enjoy it while it lasts.

They meant it kindly and it is precisely the wrong shape, because it puts a clock on the gift and hands you the job of watching it. Scripture never dates the gift. It names the giver, and then it tells you He does not vary, which is a different kind of comfort altogether and a much sturdier one. You have a Father of lights this week, present tense, and He was the Father of lights in the bad spring too, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to work out which sort of week is coming next.

But the question is still sitting there, so let us say it out loud rather than around it.

What if it does turn? What if there is another Tuesday night at half past nine. Ask it plainly, because you are asking it anyway, and James answers it in the very next verse before the question is even finished: by His own will He brought us forth by the word of truth. You were brought here by His will and by His word, not by the run of one good fortnight, and the Spirit who was in that kitchen with you in the bad spring did not arrive last Monday and will not leave on Saturday.

Which brings me to the flowers, and I am not being sentimental about flowers.

The tulips in the paper are a good gift from above. That is not my warm opinion of a bunch of tulips; that is the Holy Spirit speaking through James 1:17, and a good gift from above is safe to put in water. You are allowed to have them. There is no arrangement anywhere in Scripture where receiving something with both hands makes you liable for it later.

And one last thing, gently, because I know what the bracing feels like from the inside.

Nobody is standing over you with a stopwatch about how long it takes to unclench. The Spirit does not work like that and He never has, and He is standing on a letter that never once makes the gift conditional on the composure of the person receiving it. You are not spoiling the good by flinching at it. A woman who watches the door is still a woman being given tulips.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.James 1:17