The List You Read on the Bus

The bus takes twenty-six minutes and he reads it for most of them.

One sheet, folded into four, and the folds have gone soft as cloth. A schedule of contents, typed up by somebody at the solicitor's office who had never stood in the room being described. Bench, with vice. Treadle lathe. Twenty-two hand planes, wall mounted. Chest, and contents.

Chest, and contents. Four words, and he has thought about them more than he has thought about anything else this year.

The workshop is two streets from where he works. His uncle had it for forty years, and the smell of it, which he can still produce in his head at will, is linseed and pencil shavings and the particular dust of oak.

He has been twice. Once with the solicitor, who talked the whole time. Once on his own, in April, when he stood at the door with his hand on the handle for long enough that a woman crossing the yard asked if he was all right.

He is not a nervous man. It is not nerves. It is closer to this: the sheet is his, and the room is somebody else's, and the two facts have not been able to sit in the same head. A man does not walk into another man's workshop and start lifting lids. A man waits to be shown round. A man waits, if he is honest about it, to be asked a second time by somebody with the authority to ask.

Then, in December, he goes on a Saturday because the yard is quiet on a Saturday, and he turns the handle, and the room is warm.

Not preserved. Warm. There is a heater on the low setting in the corner and it has been running for two years. The man from the unit across the yard comes out with his hands in his pockets and says it as though it were nothing at all.

"We keep it ticking over. Tools sweat if you let a place go cold. Your uncle did the same for my grandad's press."

And you stood in the middle of a warm workshop in December with a folded sheet in your hand and did not know where to put your face.

Because you know that sheet. You could recite it. You have read the terms of what you were left more times than you would ever admit to another human being, on a bus, in a coat, twice a day.

And you have never once lifted the lid of the chest.

An heir is not a claimant

Let me say the true thing about the reading before anything else, because a hopeful sentence laid over an unnamed weight slides straight off it.

The reading was not cowardice, and nobody here is going to call it that. Reading is what a careful man does with a document he has not yet been given permission to believe. You did the honorable thing with a strange gift: you checked it, and then you checked it again, and the checking was never the fault.

But there is a trap inside it that nobody warns anybody about. A document read closely enough and often enough begins to feel like a document about somebody else. That is not a moral failure. It is what happens to any text held at arm's length for long enough, and it has been happening to you on the number nine twice a day.

Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.Colossians 1:12

Read the tense before you read the comfort. Hath made us meet. Not is considering. Not will make, once there is evidence. The qualifying is in the past and the verb belongs to the Father, and there is no clause anywhere in the sentence in which the reader does any of the qualifying himself.

The Greek there is hikanoo, to make sufficient, to make competent, to make adequate to a thing. It is the word you would use of somebody being made fit for an office. And the grammar puts the whole of that action on the other side of the table.

You are an heir now, and not a name on a list of possible heirs. Colossians 1:12 says the Father hath made us meet to be partakers, which is a completed act rather than a pending assessment, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who takes a finished verb and makes it land on a man who has been reading a folded sheet on a bus for a year.

Notice the difference between two men standing at the same door. A claimant is asking whether he may. He wants to know the grounds, the terms, whether his case holds, and he is right to want that, because a claimant has no standing until somebody grants it. An heir is asking where things are kept.

A claimant reads the terms. An heir opens the lid.

You have been made fit for this, and the making was not your work. His word says it plainly in that same verse, that the Father did the qualifying, and the Spirit is the one who takes a sentence like that off a page and puts it into the hand of a man who has spent April deciding whether he would be presuming.

Nobody is waiting to be asked twice

Now the other half of it, and this is the half that has kept you at the door.

You have been waiting to be asked a second time by somebody with the authority to ask, and it has felt like courtesy, and underneath the courtesy is a sentence you would not say out loud: that your name may have gone onto that schedule by an oversight nobody has got round to correcting.

You were given a deposit before you were ever given the room. Ephesians 1:14 calls the Holy Spirit the earnest of our inheritance, and the word behind earnest is the first installment that makes a transfer legally binding, so the Spirit in you is not encouragement about a thing that might happen, He is the down payment on a thing already settled.

And there is a man in the Gospels standing exactly where you are standing, and almost nobody notices him because the story is famous for his brother.

The elder son is out in the field. He has been there the whole time. He has not left, he has not spent anything, he has done everything asked of him, and when he finally says what he has been carrying it turns out to be this: thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. He had spent years on an estate he was heir to, believing he had to be handed a goat before he was allowed to have one.

And the father does not argue with him. He says, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

You have permission that was never once withheld from you. Luke 15:31 has the father saying all that I have is thine to a man who has been standing in the field the whole time believing the opposite, and the Spirit is the one who makes that sentence stop being about a story and start being about a workshop with a heater running in the corner.

Read what the elder son's problem was, because it is not what people usually say. It was not resentment. Resentment came later and came out of it. His problem was that he had been living as staff on his own inheritance, and no one had ever corrected him, and he was too honorable to help himself to what he had not been formally given.