My Own Voice Off The Glass

There is an hour in a covered market, after the schools have gone and before the shutters, when you can hear the fridges.

He can hear his own fridges from the far end of the aisle, which tells him everything. There was a time you could not hear yourself think in here on a Saturday. Two rows down, the unit that was a haberdashery has been papered over so long that the paper has faded to a different color.

He calls anyway. Out of habit, and because his father called, and because a man behind a stall who stops calling has agreed to something. He gives the line he has given since he was a boy, in the voice he keeps for it, up into the roof.

Nothing comes back but his own voice off the glass.

He knows the pitch rent goes out whatever the aisle does. It does not care about footfall, and he does not blame it for that, any more than he blames the frost.

What he has noticed, and told nobody, is smaller and worse. Somewhere in the last few years he stopped being a man with a quiet pitch and started being a quiet pitch with a man behind it. When somebody asks how the stall is doing, he answers, and the answer has crept forward until it stands where his name used to.

He locks up. He walks out past the papered unit. And on the way to the car he says something to himself that is meant to be encouraging, and hears it for what it is, which is the same voice again, coming back off the same glass.

And you have been doing that too, or you would not have opened this.

An echo is only ever you

Let us start with why the pep talk in the car park never works, because it is not a fault in you and it is not a lack of trying.

An echo has no new information in it. It is the same voice, at a slight delay, coming back off a hard surface, and however loudly it goes up it can only ever return what was already there. That is the whole trouble with telling yourself that you matter. The mouth saying it is the mouth that has been keeping the takings.

A name is a different kind of event. A name comes from outside you. It is spoken by somebody with standing, about you, whether or not you agree with it, and it holds when your own voice has gone hoarse.

So hear this from outside your own head. You are named already, and it was done by God rather than by the aisle, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that name into a man at the end of a quiet day, because it is the Spirit itself that beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God (Romans 8:16).

That is not my encouragement to you. Encouragement is another echo. That is the written word about you, and it was true all afternoon while the fridges were the loudest thing in the building.

God named a man who was hiding in a hole

Look at where God does this, because it tells you what He is prepared to name and when.

There is a man threshing wheat in a winepress. That is the wrong place and everybody knew it. Wheat is threshed up in the open where the wind can take the chaff, and he is down in a stone hollow doing it in secret because raiders have taken everything for years and he does not want to lose the little that is left.

He is not being heroic. He is hiding, and his crop is a fraction of what it should be, and he is doing an outdoor job in a hole in the ground.

And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him, and said unto him, The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valour.Judges 6:12

Read where that is spoken. Not on the far side of the story. Not after the army. It is said down in the winepress, with the raiders still coming and nothing whatsoever put right, and the man himself answers back with a question about why all this has happened to them, which God does not take offense at either.

You are being spoken to in exactly that place. Not once the aisle fills up again, not once there is a good quarter behind you, but here, and the same Spirit who carried that sentence into a hollow in the rock carries God's written word about you into a covered market at the quiet hour.

What He calls you is not a consolation prize

I want to be careful here, because this is where a page like this can go wrong and I have seen it go wrong.

I am not offering you a name instead of the help you still need. The pitch rent is real. The takings are real. Nothing in this article changes a figure on the sheet and nothing on this page pretends to know what God will do about any of it. If there is help within reach, go and get it, and do not let one word of this slow you down.

And I am not talking about how you look to other people. Not the neighbors, not the traders two rows down, not the family. That is a different weight for a different day.

This is about the thing that has quietly happened between you and God, where the number began to function as a description. That is the part that has to be answered, and it is answered by a naming rather than by a good month.

You are already what He says, right now, in the same hour that the takings say what they say. Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people (1 Peter 2:9) was written to people with nothing much, scattered and pushed about, and the Holy Spirit did not add a clause about turnover before it.