The Craft Box Under the Stairs

The crate is the big blue one with the cracked lid that never clipped properly on the left hand side.

Inside it: felt shapes in a sandwich bag, a sheep with one ear gone. Story cards with the corners furred soft from six years of small hands. A tin of glue sticks, most of them dried. A laminated sheet of names in her own handwriting, with the allergies in red down the side, and a boy called Denny whose name has a star by it because Denny needed telling twice and then he was gold.

She ran the under sevens for six years. She was good at it in the specific way that never gets written down anywhere: she knew which child would not sit unless they had a job, and she could make Jonah last eight minutes without anybody being frightened of the fish, and she remembered that Denny's nan had died in the spring.

Then the letters started coming about her own boy. Appointments on a Tuesday, then two Tuesdays, then a Thursday as well, and a year that turned into car parks and forms and a folder with a rubber band round it that lived on the hall table. She stood in the corridor after the second month and told the children's leader she would need to step out for a bit, and the leader said of course, of course, take whatever you need, and meant it.

She said she would be back after Christmas.

Somebody else took the under sevens and does it beautifully, and the felt board has been replaced with something that projects, and it is better, and everybody says so. The crate came home in the boot of the car and went under the stairs behind the vacuum and the bag of bags, and it has been there ever since.

Things settled, in the way things do. Not tidily. There are still appointments and there is still a folder, and the rhythm of the house is a different rhythm now, and you have got used to it the way you get used to anything.

And you never went back.

You did not decide it in one go. You decided it in about forty small pieces, on forty ordinary evenings, and if anybody asked you would say the season closed, and you would say it lightly, and you would move the conversation on. The truth is more particular than that. You did not conclude that the season closed. You concluded that it closed permanently, and that whatever you had in that room went somewhere else while you were in a car park, and you have never said either of those sentences out loud to anybody.

The season closed. That is not the same as the gift closing.

I want to say something before one word of encouragement, because encouragement laid on top of an unnamed thing slides straight off it.

Stopping was right.

Not understandable. Not forgivable. Right. A child needed his mother in a corridor on a Tuesday, and his mother went, and there is no version of faithfulness anywhere in Scripture in which that is a fall. The same love that made her good with Denny is the love that put her in that car park, spent in the direction where it was actually needed. Nobody in heaven filed it under quitting, and the only person who has ever used that word about it is the one reading this.

So let us be exact about what happened. A season closed. A gift did not.

Those two things have been welded together in your head so long that they feel like one object, and they are not one object, and the whole of this message is a chisel between them.

You are still carrying what you carried into that room, and it did not thin out in the dark behind the vacuum cleaner. Paul told a young man to stir up the gift of God which is in thee, present tense, still in there, needing stirring rather than reissuing, and that letter was written to somebody whose fire had gone low and not to somebody who had lost it. It is the Holy Spirit and not this paragraph who makes that land on a woman standing in a hallway with a folder under a rubber band.

Look at the verb.

Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.2 Timothy 1:6

Stir up. Not apply for. Not earn back. Not prove yourself ready for. The word underneath it is the picture of poking a banked fire, the kind that has been sitting under ash all night and looks for all the world like it went out, and comes back gold the moment somebody moves it with a stick.

Ash on a fire is not the same as no fire. And the ash on this one is not sin, and it is not neglect. It is a year of car parks, which is to say it is love, which is the last thing on earth that could put a fire out.

You were not demoted while you were away. Scripture is explicit that there are diversities of gifts but one and the same Spirit, dividing to every man severally as He will, so the dividing belongs to the Holy Spirit and was never a competition anybody could drop out of by missing Sundays.

Anointing is not a ladder, and there is no rung you fell off

Here is where people go wrong with this word, and it does real damage.

Somewhere in the back of the mind sits a picture of anointing as a level. A grade. Something the faithful accumulate and the interrupted forfeit, so that six years of under sevens was a rank you held, and stepping out of the room was a demotion, and the woman who took over is now standing where you used to stand, higher up the ladder than you.

There is no ladder. There never was one. The whole image is imported from work, where there genuinely are grades and somebody genuinely does take your desk, and it has been quietly laid over the things of God where it does not belong.

You are not less anointed than the woman doing it now, and she is not more anointed than you. The written word puts every gift in the church under one Spirit dividing as He wills, and a body is not a league table, and it is the Spirit Himself who keeps that true whether or not anybody in that hall has ever explained it to you.

And notice what the ladder idea actually does to a person. It makes the going back enormous. If a gift is a rank, then walking back in means presenting yourself for reassessment in front of everybody who watched you leave. Nobody wants that, so the crate stays under the stairs, and the whole thing is protected by a picture that was never true in the first place.

You have the same thing in your hands this morning that you had on the last Sunday you stood in that room. God has said His gifts and His calling are without repentance, which means He does not change His mind about what He put in somebody, and His Spirit has kept it while your hands were full of other things.

And you are not obliged to go back to the same room to pick it up. The gift was never the room. Scripture shows the same Spirit at work in a hillside, a house, a riverside and a prison, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a specific carpet before He will move on a woman who is good with children.