No Job At This Wedding

The hall has been done properly. Somebody has run a line of jam jars down the middle of every table with sweet peas in them, the good sort of bunting is up, and there is a kid of about seventeen going around the room with a jug of water who has clearly been told to keep going around the room with the jug of water.

Ken is at table six with his hands on his knees.

He does not know what to do with his hands, because in thirty years of these he has never once sat through the first twenty minutes. He is the one who goes back for the folding chairs. He is the one who takes the elderly aunt to the accessible entrance and then moves the car. He is the one who spots that the coffee urn has not been turned on. It is not a virtue and he would not call it one. It is simply what he has been for as long as anybody in this room has known him, and it means he has never had to find out what he is like at a table with nothing to do.

Today the caterers have it. There are eight of them, they are quick and cheerful, and there is not one job left in the building that belongs to Ken.

And Tuesday happened. He has not told anybody in this hall about Tuesday, and he is not going to today, and it sits under his ribs like a swallowed stone while the best man's brother tries to work out the seating. If somebody at this table turned and asked him for anything at all, anything, he would have to say no. He has no idea when that last happened. He is not sure it ever has.

Then the lad with the jug fills his glass, and a plate arrives in front of him that he did not carry, cannot pay for, and has done nothing to deserve, and it lands with a small ordinary sound, and Ken has to look at the sweet peas for a moment.

You have had a day like this. Maybe you are in it. Everybody near you assumes you are the strong one because you have been the strong one, and there is nothing in your hands today, and the thought of being seen with nothing in your hands is somehow worse than the emptiness itself.

The chair is not a waiting room

Let me name the exact fear, because it is very rarely said out loud and it runs half the useful people I have ever met.

It is not that you might be a burden for an afternoon. It is that you suspect your welcome was always attached to your usefulness, and that you have simply never been in a position to find out, because you have never once turned up empty. So the emptiness feels like an audit. Some part of you is braced for a bill.

Hear this while you are still sitting there with nothing. You are received today, exactly as you came, and there is no ledger open with your name on it. The written word calls God a dwelling place, which is a thing you are inside rather than a thing you keep up, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a fact in a man rather than a nice sentence.

The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

That is Moses, at the end of everything, blessing a people he is about to stop leading. Look at where the arms are. Not in front, waiting to be reached. Not above, ready to be summoned. Underneath, already, before anybody in the story does a single thing about it. Arms that are underneath a man do not ask him what he brought. He is already on them, and he was on them all the way through the years when he thought he was carrying everybody else. You are on those same arms this afternoon, and you were on them through every year you thought you were the one holding it up. Deuteronomy 33:27 says underneath, not in front and not above, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a word like underneath into something a man can feel rather than merely agree with.

I spend most of my life among old books, and there is a rule in that trade about a damaged binding. You do not prop it. You do not stand it up on the shelf with the others and hope. You lay it flat, fully supported along its whole length, and you leave it there, and the support is not a stage in a repair the book has to complete. It is simply what you do with something you value. Nobody has ever asked a book to justify the table it is lying on.

So take this in the chair, while the jug goes round. You have not slipped out of the reach of God's kindness by having nothing to hand anybody. Scripture never once makes His mercy an exchange, and His Spirit is not waiting at the door of this afternoon with a form for you to fill in.

And there is a lie to put down before it settles, because it is the one that finds people like Ken. It says that the rest you are being handed is a repair. That God is topping you up so that you can be useful again by the weekend, and the whole thing is a maintenance schedule for a workhorse. That is not what is happening here. The mercy in front of you is toward you. Full stop. Not toward you as an instrument, not toward the people who will need you next week, toward you, the man at table six with the sweet peas going soft in the heat.

You were loved before you were useful. It is written into the shape of the whole gospel, that He gives to people with nothing to bring and calls it grace precisely because it could never be earned, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that out of doctrine and puts it in a chest.

One plain thing, and then we go on. If what you are carrying is heavier than a hard week, if it is the sort of weight that has started talking to you about whether you are needed at all, then telling one real person, or your doctor, is not a detour around what God is doing. It is part of it. Nothing on this page is asking you to sit alone with something that needs a human being beside you.