Since I Was Nine

The preacher was two thirds of the way through and he was not even making a point of it.

He said, and of course He is coming back.

That was all. Seven words, in passing, on the way to something else, and the woman in the third row felt her hands go cold in her lap the way they always do, and her stomach dropped the way it always does, and she began, without deciding to, the inventory.

Anything unconfessed. Anything half dealt with. The thing from work. The way she spoke to her sister on the phone on Wednesday. The two years she does not talk about. She goes down the list at speed, checking, checking, the way a person checks their pockets on the way out of the house, and by the time she surfaces the preacher is three paragraphs further on and she has not heard a word of it.

She is forty seven. She has been doing this since she was nine.

Different building then. Different voice at the front. Same seven words, and the same cold drop, and a child going down a list of nine year old sins in a wooden pew with her feet not touching the floor.

She has never told anybody. What would you even say. Everyone around her sings about this. The whole room lifts when that sentence comes. She lifts her face with them and she is somewhere else entirely, running her pockets.

And now I am going to stop saying she.

Because you know that drop. Maybe yours is a hymn line. Maybe it is a certain kind of sky at about five in the afternoon in November. Maybe somebody in your family says the word and you change the subject and nobody has ever noticed that you change the subject.

And what nobody has ever said to you, out loud, is that the reaction in your body is not the reaction that sentence was written to produce.

He chose the adjective

Let me start with the only word that matters here, and it is not the frightening one.

waiting for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.Titus 2:13

Blessed.

That is the adjective, and it is not decoration, and it was not chosen carelessly. Of all the words that could have gone in front of hope in that sentence, the one that is actually there means happy, and full, and the thing anybody would call good if they were being honest about what they wanted. Titus 2:13 puts blessed in front of hope and the Holy Spirit kept that adjective there rather than a sterner one.

Not the solemn hope. Not the sobering hope. Not the hope we must all take seriously.

The blessed hope.

And read the other word, the one doing the quiet work. Waiting. Not bracing. Those are two entirely different postures and your body knows the difference even if your head has never separated them.

A person braces for a stranger with authority. Bracing is what you do at a door when the inspection is due and you are not sure the paperwork is in order, and everything in you goes hard and small and fast, and that is exactly what has been happening in your chest since you were nine. 2 Timothy 1:7 says God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, and the Spirit named in that verse is the one actually issued.

A person waits for someone they love. Waiting leans forward. Waiting keeps looking up the road for no good reason. Waiting is a child at a window who has been told nothing except that he is coming.

The event is the same. The posture is not, and the posture comes entirely out of what you believe about who is arriving.

So here is the tender thing, and it is the whole of the message.

The One who is coming is the One who already came for you.

That is not a different person. It is not a stern later version of Him who has had time to reconsider. The face at the end of the road belongs to the man who put His hands on people nobody else would touch, who would not break a bruised reed, who wept outside a tomb. Nothing about Him has been revised. A nine year old heart got the arithmetic wrong, and it was nobody's fault, and thirty eight years of it have been carried since. Hebrews 13:8 says Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever, and it is the same Spirit who reveals Him rather than a childhood room deciding what He is like.

And I want to say plainly what I am not doing. I am not going to describe anything to you. Not a scenario, not a sequence, not a headline, not one thing you might see out of a window. That is not what this is for, and the sort of message that trades in that has usually got its energy from exactly the cold drop I am trying to take off you. Fear makes a person move fast for a fortnight and then makes them tired for years, and God has never once needed it to get anybody home.