The Gift Did Not Have a Lease

Unit four, behind the builders' merchant, nine until twelve on a Saturday.

It was never anything official. It started because a lad on his street kept pushing a bike with a snapped chain past his house and he got tired of watching it happen. By the second winter there were nine of them, and a kettle, and a tin with biscuits in it that somebody's grandmother kept refilling without ever being asked.

They fixed mowers. Bikes, mostly, and one strimmer engine that took four Saturdays and taught more than anything else in the two and a half years. He never gave a talk. He would put a spanner in a boy's hand and stand at his shoulder and say almost nothing, and the boy would get it wrong, and then get it slightly less wrong, and somewhere in there a fifteen year old who had been told he was thick would find out that he was not.

Two and a half years. Then there was a disagreement about the unit, and the disagreement is not this story, and nobody in it is going to be described here. What matters is that on a Tuesday in October he carried three trays of tools out to the car and posted the keys back through the letterbox, and that was that.

The tools are in a plastic crate in his garage now, behind the mower. He has not opened it. He knows exactly what is on top, which tells you how often he thinks about it.

Last month a boy from three doors down stood at the end of his drive holding a bike with the chain off and looked at him with the specific hopefulness of a kid who has heard something about you from somebody.

And he said, without meaning to, and before he had thought about it at all: "I don't do that any more."

He has been hearing himself say it ever since. Because it is not true, and he knew it was not true before the boy had got to the gate, and it came out of his mouth anyway. Somewhere in the last year you decided that the thing you carry lived in that room, and that when the room went, it went. And you have not been able to find the argument against it, because the room really is gone, and the crate really is behind the mower, and the evidence looks conclusive from where you are standing.

What actually closed

Let me say the true thing before the hopeful one, because hope poured over an unnamed loss just runs off the sides.

Something real ended and it deserves to be called by its name. That was two and a half years of Saturdays. It was nine lads, several of whom nobody else was giving three hours a week to. It was a kettle and a tin and a smell of two stroke and a particular quality of quiet that fifteen year olds only ever produce when they are concentrating. Losing it is a genuine grief, and calling it only a shed with tools in it has been a way of managing the loss by shrinking it, and the shrinking has not worked, because the thing was never that size.

Grieve the room. The room was good.

And then look, carefully, at what was actually in the room, because this is where the misreading happened.

You were the one carrying it, and it never once belonged to the address. Scripture says to stir up the gift of God which is in thee, and the words in thee are doing all the work in that sentence, because a thing that is in a man travels with the man, and the Holy Spirit who put it there did not sign anything at the letting agent's.

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

Read where it is located. Not in a building, not in a group, not in a season, not in the arrangement that made it visible. In thee. The unit was the place it happened to be exercised in for two and a half years, and a place where a gift is exercised is a venue, not a container.

You have been treating a venue as a vault. The written word says that the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, which is old English for God does not change His mind about what He has handed out, and the Spirit who distributes to every man severally as He wills did not attach a clause about premises.

Stirring up is not applying for

There is a second thing under the first, and it is quieter, and it is the one I would want to reach if I had only one sentence.

You have been thinking about this as though the calling were a position that was withdrawn. As though there were a list somewhere, and you had been on it, and now you are not. That is not what anointing is, and it has never been what it is. Anointing is oil for a job, not a rank in an organization. Nobody in Scripture is ever described as more anointed than somebody else, because it is not that kind of noun. It does not stack, it does not promote, and it cannot be confiscated by the ending of a tenancy.

You have not been demoted, because there was never a ladder. His word says there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit, and the same Spirit worketh all in all, and a description like that has no room in it for tiers, and the Holy Spirit is the one who settles that in a man rather than a paragraph doing it.

Notice the verb Paul reaches for, too. Stir up. It is the word for what you do to a fire that has gone quiet under the ash: you do not go and fetch fire from somewhere else, you agitate what is already burning down there and it comes back up. That is the whole instruction. It assumes the fire is present. It assumes the ash is real. It assumes nobody needs to be relit, only stirred.

Which is why what happens next is so much smaller than you have been imagining. You have been waiting for another unit. Another Saturday slot, another nine lads, another two and a half years, the whole thing rebuilt before you are allowed to consider yourself in possession of anything.

You have everything you need for the next small thing, and it fits in a driveway. Scripture says the anointing which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and abideth is a settling word, a staying word, and the Holy Spirit does not abide provisionally in a man pending better facilities.