The Evening the Shop Was Shut

She has never once arrived at that house with nothing in her hands. Not once in nine years.

Usually it is a tin of biscuits, the good ones with the paper cases, because a tin says a person thought about it in advance. Sometimes flowers off the forecourt of the garage, which are not much, but they are something, and something is the entire point. In August it was a paper bag of pears that she had to carry on her lap the whole way.

This evening the bus sat in traffic for twenty minutes with the windows steaming up, and the corner shop had its shutter halfway down and a man inside cashing up with his back to the glass, and she stood in the rain for a full ten seconds working out whether it would be reasonable to tap on it.

It would not be reasonable. She knows that. She stood there anyway.

So she walks the last two streets with an umbrella that will not close properly and nothing else at all, and she is composing. That is the honest word for it. By the corner she has a sentence about the traffic. By the gate she has added the shop, and an apology for the lateness, and a small joke against herself to take the edge off, and she is going over the running order the way you would going into an interview.

She is thirty-eight years old. This is her family's house.

The door goes before she reaches it, because somebody heard the gate the way they always do, and the hall light comes out onto the wet step.

Here is where it is you, because you know the whole choreography.

You started the sentence on the doormat. The traffic, then the shop, then sorry, and you got as far as the shutter being down before your umbrella was taken out of your hand and stood in the sink to drip, which is where it has always gone, and somebody said the kettle had only just boiled.

You said it again in the kitchen doorway, more thoroughly this time, because it did not feel finished. That the shop was shut. That you would have brought something.

And whoever was nearest said, without turning round, that there were biscuits in the tin already, and asked how the buses were.

That was all. That was the entire response.

Then you looked at the table, and it was laid. Five places, the side plates with the blue rim that only come out for company, and yours in the same spot it has been in since you were nine. Laid at half past five, before anybody knew whether you would make it, before the traffic, before the shutter.

And you stood in the doorway of a house you have belonged to your whole life, holding a sentence you had been building since the bus stop, with nowhere to put it down.

The apology is not your fault, and it is not required

Before anything else, I want to say something about the preamble you make before you pray, because I do not think anybody has ever said it to you kindly.

It is not a character flaw. It came from somewhere. Somewhere along the line arriving with nothing became genuinely unbearable, and a person who builds themselves a way of making an arrival bearable has done something resourceful and not something shameful. I am not going to stand here and tell you off for the tin of biscuits. The tin of biscuits kept you coming.

But it is not required, and it never was, and the sentence you keep composing on the way in has been landing on a Father who was already halfway to the door.

You are an heir, and there is no version of this where you are a caller. Scripture says thou art no more a servant, but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a legal sentence like that and makes it feel like a hallway with the light on.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

Sit with the word Abba for a second. It is not formal. It is the sound a small child makes at the leg of a parent, and the apostle chose it deliberately over every dignified alternative available to him, and then he named the One who puts that word in your mouth.

You have not been approaching a stranger, however strange the approach has felt. That verse names the Holy Spirit Himself as the Spirit of adoption, which means the very impulse that turns you toward God at all is already family language happening inside you, and the nervousness at the door was never evidence about your standing.

The table was laid at half past five

There is a moment in the story of the two sons that gets read past, and it is the one I want in your hands today.

When the older brother refuses to come in, the father goes out to him in the yard, in the middle of his own party, and says: Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. Not will be. Not once you settle down. All that I have is thine, spoken to a man standing outside in a temper with his arms folded.

You were given a place at that table before you brought anything to it, and nothing you have carried up the path since has adjusted it. Ephesians 1:11 says that in Him we have obtained an inheritance, and obtained is past tense and it is not your verb in that sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who seals it, which the same chapter says two verses later.

That is what an inheritance is. It is not wages, which respond to conduct. It is not a prize, which responds to performance. It is what belongs to you because of whose you are, and the only qualification anywhere in it is the relationship, which was established at the cross and not on the doormat.

And you have it now, in the present tense, and not on a date to be confirmed. He promised that we are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, present tense in the Greek and present tense in your Tuesday, and the Holy Spirit is called the earnest of that inheritance, the deposit already in your hands, which is God's own way of saying that the waiting is not the point.

So the biscuits were never buying anything. That is the tender part. There was nothing to buy, and there never had been, and the nine years of tins were a kindness you were doing yourself.