The Pot That Did Not Fit in the Bag

Two in the morning, on the tiles of a bathroom, with the bag on the bathroom scales and the number refusing to move.

Twenty three. The allowance is twenty. He knows what happens to people who argue at a desk about three kilos, and he is not going to be one of them, so he lifts the bag off and sets it on the floor and opens it.

He takes out a pair of shoes that were nearly new. He takes out a jacket that is warmer than the one he is wearing and puts the warmer one on instead, because a coat you are wearing does not weigh anything, which is the kind of thing a man learns in about four days.

Twenty one and a half.

He takes out the album of photographs, opens it on the tiles, tears out eleven pages, and leaves the covers.

Twenty point nine.

And then there is the pot.

It is his father's. Long handled, brass, dented in a curve near the base where it went off a table when he was six and everyone in the room went silent and then everyone in the room laughed. It has made coffee for every single person who ever came through that door, for forty years, and it stands in the same place on the same shelf and has never in its life been put anywhere else.

He is holding it in a bathroom at two in the morning working out that it weighs about a kilo.

He carries it back to the kitchen and puts it on the shelf. He does not do anything else. He does not take a photograph of it, and he does not say anything to it, because it is a pot and he is thirty one years old. He puts it in its place and squares it up and closes the door on the way out.

Twenty point four. Close enough.

That was four years ago.

Now the flat is his and the tenancy has his name typed in the box and the letter came, and then the second letter, and the job is steady, and there is coffee in his kitchen made in a stainless steel thing from a supermarket that works perfectly well.

And most nights, somewhere between the light going off and sleep, the court sits.

It starts with the pot and it never stays there. Because if he had packed differently he would have carried the pot, and if he had left a week earlier the bag would not have been the point at all, and if he had refused to go, if he had simply stayed and taken what came, then nothing would have been left on any shelf because he would have been in that house with all of it.

So which one was it? That is the question, and he has never once said it out loud. Which decision was the sin? The pot? The night? The whole leaving? Is a man who gets himself out a man who saved himself, and is that the thing being answered for now, quietly, in a country where everything is fine?

Underneath all of it, unsaid, is the sentence that runs the whole court: that everything he lost was taken from him on purpose, and that the purpose was about something he did.

Now let me stop calling him he.

Because you have your own twenty kilos. Something got left, in a leaving or an ending or a year you did not choose, and ever since you have been going back over the decisions looking for the one that explains the cost.

Put the bag down. Nothing is being weighed here.

What it is not

I am going to spend this whole message telling you what your loss is not, and then I am going to stop. I want to say that plainly at the top so that nobody sits braced through every paragraph waiting for the turn where I explain it to you. There is no such turn. I do not have an explanation and I would not hand you one if I did.

Here is the first thing it is not.

For my Lord will not cast off forever. Though He causes grief, He will have compassion according to the abundance of His covenant faithfulness. For He does not afflict from His heart, nor does He grieve the children of men.Lamentations 3, verses 31 to 33

Not from His heart. Sit in that phrase, because the man who wrote it was looking at a burnt city and had every reason to write the opposite. Whatever came, it did not come out of God's heart toward you, and the Holy Spirit put that sentence into the middle of the saddest book in the Bible so that it could never be mistaken for the opinion of somebody who had not suffered.

So the pot on the shelf is not God's answer to a decision you made at two in the morning. You are not being dealt with. Lamentations 3:31 stands at the front of it, my Lord will not cast off forever, and His Spirit has been carrying that line toward you for four years while you sat in the dark trying your own case.

I cannot tell you why the shelf is bare. Nobody honest can. What Romans 8:1 can tell you is one thing and it tells it flatly: there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit of life in Christ has already set a man free from the whole machinery of sentencing. You have been running a court that has no judge in it. God is not sitting in it. He is not the prosecution and He is not the bench, and the only person in that room every night at half past eleven is you.

And notice what the court cannot do. It has no evidence, because a man cannot go back and run the other version of that night and see what it cost. It has no verdict it can ever deliver, because the sentence has already been served somewhere else by Someone else. It has no adjournment either, which is why it sits every night.

That is not my reading of your four years.

That is Lamentations 3:22 and 23, where the covenant faithfulness of the Lord has not ended and His compassions have not run out but are new every morning, and the Spirit has been putting a fresh morning in front of you every single day of those four years, including the ones you spent in session.

Now let me refuse the thing you may be waiting for me to say.

I am not going to tell you the leaving made you stronger. I am not going to tell you the pot was something you had to put down so your hands would be free, or that the loss was shaping you, or that God took it in order to give you something else. Every one of those sentences is a small, warm lie, and each one quietly hands the grief a job so that nobody has to sit with it. You are loved right here, in the version of your life where the shelf is bare and nothing about it has been explained, because Isaiah 54:10 says the mountains may depart and the hills be removed but His covenant of peace is not removed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold when a man has no explanation at all.