Three Sundays and a Silence

Ten past. The gravel is half empty because everybody who was coming came, and he can hear the first song through the wall from where he is parked, muffled, the bass of it more than the tune.

He has been sitting in the cab for eleven minutes.

Three Sundays. He can list them the way a man lists a tool he lent out and never got back.

The first one, his daughter went up to thirty nine and a half in the night and his wife was on shift, so he sat on the landing with a wet cloth and a cartoon on his phone and never got dressed. Nobody on earth would call that a failure.

The second one, the other driver's wife went into labor on the Saturday and he took the double, which is what you do, and he slept from noon until four in the afternoon and woke up with the taste of the depot in his mouth.

The third one is the one he keeps coming back to.

There was nothing wrong with the third one. He got up. He made coffee. He stood in the kitchen with the radio going, and the hour went past him like a bus he did not put his hand out for, and by the time he noticed it was quarter to eleven and there was no point. He has told himself since that he was tired. He was not particularly tired.

And then, somewhere in the fortnight after that third Sunday, the line went dead.

He prays in the cab. He has done it for years, coming off nights, forty minutes of road and nobody to hear him and a habit older than his marriage. And for about two weeks now it has been like talking into a phone that is still warm in your hand and has no line in it. No anger in the quiet. That is the strange part. Just nothing coming back.

So he has been doing what a man does. He has been running the numbers. Three Sundays, then the quiet. Three Sundays, then the quiet. He is not stupid and he can see a pattern, and the pattern says he has spent something down and this is the balance.

He is still on that when somebody raps the window with one knuckle.

It is the old man who does the car park, the one with the fluorescent coat and the terrible jokes, and he has his face bent down to the glass, and what he says, through two inches of window, is: are you coming in, or are you doing your accounts?

And the man in the cab sits there with his hand on the key, because that is exactly, precisely, humiliatingly what he has been doing. For a fortnight. Accounts.

You have sat in that car park. Maybe not the gravel, but the arithmetic.

Accounts nobody ever opened

Here is what I want to put in front of you first, before a single word of comfort, because comfort laid on top of bad arithmetic just makes a softer wrong answer.

Nobody opened an account. There is no ledger. There is no column with your Sundays going down one side and God's warmth coming out the other, and the reason there is not is not that God is easygoing about it. It is that the thing under your feet was never priced. You cannot run a balance on something nobody ever put a number against.

Read what God actually did about this, because Scripture tells you and it is short.

The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.Psalm 110:4

Two things happen in that line, and I do not want you to move past either of them.

He swore. God almost never does this. He does not need to; His plain word is already the most solid thing in existence, and swearing adds nothing to a truth that could not be truer. So when He does it, it is not for His sake. It is for the sake of somebody who is going to sit in a car park one day and need to be told twice.

And then: will not repent. Will not change His mind. Will not reconsider. Not a promise to try, not a good intention, not a mood God was in on a particular afternoon that could turn out differently on a worse one.

So take this as spoken over you and not merely explained to you. You are standing on something that was sworn, and Psalm 110:4 says in the same breath that the One who swore it does not reopen it, which means the fortnight you just had could not touch it and did not touch it. The Holy Spirit is the One carrying that line across the gap from a page to your chest right now, and He is not waiting for your attendance to improve before He does it.

The priest who never goes off shift

Now, a man who works shifts knows the one thing every shift worker knows in his bones: who is on, who is off, and what time the changeover falls.

That verse says for ever. Hebrews picks the same line up and says it in a way that lands on a man with a rota in his back pocket:

But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood. Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.Hebrews 7:24-25

He ever liveth. He is not off. There was no changeover at any point in the last fortnight. Nobody covered the desk badly. Nobody clocked out at eleven and left the phone ringing in an empty room.

And notice who is doing the work in that sentence. Not you, arriving. Him, interceding. Continuously. Through the fever Sunday, through the double, through the one with the radio on and no excuse attached to it.

So hear the next one too. You have a priest who was sworn in and has never once gone off shift, and that is not my encouragement, it is what stands written in Hebrews 7:25 in black ink; the Holy Spirit is the One making the line breathe in you rather than just sit there being accurate.

About the quiet

I am not going to tell you why it went quiet. I do not know, and Scripture does not hand me a reason for your particular fortnight, and I will not invent one to round the article off nicely. Men who invent reasons for other men's silences do a lot of damage.

What I can do is tell you what the quiet is not, and I can do that with confidence, because it is written down.

It is not a bill. It is not a withdrawal. It is not God stepping back to see whether you will come looking, which is a thing people say and which turns the Father of mercies into somebody playing a game with a frightened man in a truck. And it is not the covenant coming apart, because an oath God swore and will not reconsider does not come apart. It can be doubted. It can be misread at ten past on a Sunday. It cannot be broken.

You were inside it during the fever, inside it during the double, and inside it on the morning with the radio going, and Psalm 110:4 is the reason, not your record. His Spirit has been holding you inside a thing you had privately decided you had spent.