The Rock I Was Not Cut From

The shoebox came from the top of his father's wardrobe and has been on his kitchen table for nine days, because after a funeral there is a stretch where nobody can throw anything away and nobody can look at it either.

Eleven at night. Everyone asleep. He finally takes the lid off.

Most of it is what you would expect. A watch that does not go. Two dozen photographs of people nobody living can name. A ticket stub. And near the bottom, folded in four and gone soft the way paper goes soft when it has been folded and unfolded a lot, a photocopy of a form.

A solicitor's letterhead. A date in 1958. His grandfather's signature, which he has never seen before in his life and which, he notices with something cold going down his back, is not unlike his own.

He knows the shape of what happened. Everybody knows the shape. The family sentence for it is when your grandfather went to Canada, and it is always said in a particular tone, the tone people use for weather that has already passed. He signed something in an office one Tuesday, and he went back to the house that week, and after that week he did not go back to the house again.

He does not know what was in that room in 1958. Nobody living does. And he is not going to try a man who has been dead thirty one years across his own kitchen table at eleven at night, because that is not a trial anybody can hold and the man cannot answer it.

But there is a second sheet of paper in the box, and the second one is his father, and his father never signed anything at all.

His father just got quieter. Over about fifteen years. More at work, then almost entirely at work, then in the house but not in it, in the chair with the racing on, and by the end there was nothing to name, nothing dramatic, no office, no Tuesday. Just a man who had gone somewhere without moving, and a family that got used to it the way you get used to a step that is not level.

And this is the part that has him standing up.

He is forty one. His own boy is asleep upstairs with the landing light on because he still wants it on. And for about a year now, quietly, the way a man does a sum in his head at a checkout, he has been calculating exits.

Not planning. He wants that clear. He has never made a call, never opened anything, never said a word to anyone. But there is a version of his life running underneath this one where he is not in this house, and he has been letting it run, and it has been getting more detailed. He has noticed which motorway. He has noticed how long he could go without being reached.

He stands in his kitchen with the lid in his hand and he understands that he is a third man in a line of men who go, and that he has already started.

So he puts the lid on.

And then he does not know what to do next, because he is standing in his own kitchen at eleven at night doing a thing no man in his family has done, and there is nobody to ring about it, and nobody to copy, and no story in this family about a man who stayed.

You have stood in that kitchen. Maybe not a shoebox, maybe not Canada, but the sum, and the silence where a pattern ought to have been.

Look at the rock, and then look at which one

There is a command in Isaiah that seems, at first reading, to be exactly the wrong thing to say to a man holding that shoebox.

Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the LORD: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him.Isaiah 51:1-2

Look to the rock that a man came out of. Look at the quarry.

Stop at the first line and that is a hard word at eleven at night with a signature on the table, because a man in that kitchen knows exactly which quarry he thinks he came out of, and a piece of it has just been in his hands.

But God does not stop at the first line, and this is the whole thing, so slow down here. He gives the command and then He immediately says which rock He means. Not the accumulated line. Not the men in the photographs nobody can name. Not the pattern, not the tone the family uses, not 1958. He says: Abraham. Look at Abraham.

And then He tells you why He picked him.

For I called him alone.

Alone. One man, called by God on his own, out of a house that did not have this and had never had it. Joshua tells Israel plainly that their ancestors on the other side of the river served other gods, and Abraham is the man God took out of that and started something with (Joshua 24:2). He had no precedent either. He had no father in this to copy, no uncle who had done it, nobody to ring at eleven at night.

So take this as spoken over you and not merely laid out for you. You are looking at the wrong quarry, and Isaiah 51:2 is the reason, because the rock God tells His people to look at is a man He called by himself and increased from there; the Holy Spirit is the One putting that in front of you tonight, in a kitchen, with the wrong piece of stone still warm in your hand.

What you are actually standing in

Now I want to be careful with you, because there is a way of preaching this that does more harm than the shoebox did.

I am not going to hand you a curse to break. I know the language and I am not going to use it, and here is my reason: Scripture does not put a curse in your grandfather's signature, and if I invent one for the sake of a dramatic paragraph I have just given you a fight that does not exist and a lifetime of shadow boxing in your own hallway.

What was behind you was not a spirit standing in the corner. It was an absence. There was a place where a thing should have been, and it was not there, and nobody put it there, and an absence has no fists. You do not defeat an empty room. You put something in it.

And here is what has already gone into it, before you did anything about it tonight. The covenant is not a family trait. It was never carried in your blood, your surname, your jaw or your grandfather's handwriting. It is an oath God swore, and He hands it to a man directly, which is exactly how Abraham got it and exactly why Isaiah 51:2 says alone.

You are not the fourth generation of anything. You are a man God called on his own, standing in an oath that reached you without needing to pass through any of the men in that shoebox, and the word says that is how it works; His Spirit is what makes it live in a kitchen rather than sit on a page in a book you are too tired to open.

The men in the box are not on trial here

One more thing before we move, because you will not be free until this is said.

You can honor a man and not be cut from him. Those are two different actions and a lot of sons collapse them into one and then spend twenty years either defending a man they should have simply loved, or prosecuting a man they should have simply left with God.

Your grandfather went to Canada in 1958 and you do not know what was in him. Your father went quiet over fifteen years and you do not know what that cost him either, and you never will now, and you are allowed to want them both to have had more than they had. None of that is your business tonight. Your business tonight is one man in one kitchen with a lid in his hand.

You were not handed a verdict about yourself by either of them, and Scripture never once makes a man's standing before God a function of his father's; the Holy Spirit is the One who has kept you awake caring about this instead of asleep repeating it.