Still Open At Twenty To Ten

Twenty to ten, and there has been one order since eight.

He has already turned the second fryer off. He does it quietly, the way you do a thing you have decided not to discuss, and the extractor goes on roaring over an empty counter because the extractor does not know the difference.

She is at the till with the book open and a pen she keeps losing. Behind her, through the doorway, is the meter box with its little wheel, and the wheel goes round for the fridges and the lights and the fan whether or not one single person comes through that door tonight. Standing charges is the phrase. She has learned it the way people learn words they never wanted.

They prayed about this together. Not vaguely. Sitting in the car behind the shop with the doors shut, the two of them, out loud, plainly, the way you would tell a friend. They said the thing about the meter and the thing about the lease and the thing they have not said to either of their mothers.

And nothing came back.

Not a no. That is what neither of them can explain to anybody. A no would at least be a voice. What came back was the fan and the fridges and the wheel going round, and then a Thursday, and then another Thursday.

He wipes down a counter that nobody has touched. She writes the number in the book and does not say it aloud. There is a whole conversation neither of them is having, and it has the same first line in both their heads: so where is He in this, then.

If that is your Thursday, I am not going to hurry you out of it. Come and sit down.

I am not going to tell you why it is quiet

Let me say what this page is not going to do, because most of it has probably been handed to you already and by now the bracing starts on its own.

I am not going to explain the silence to you. I do not know why nothing came back. I am not going to tell you what God is teaching you through it, or that He is building something in you with it, or that there is a key nobody handed you, or that the answer arrived in a form too disappointing to recognize. That last one is the cruellest, because it takes the one thing you know for certain, that you asked and nothing came, and quietly tells you that you cannot even be trusted with that.

You asked, and nothing came, and I believe you.

Now here is what I will say, and I want you to have it while you are standing at that till. You are not disqualified. Nothing about that quiet is a ruling on you, and I am not handing you my private hope about it: Romans 8:38 and 39 say that neither death nor life nor things present nor things to come can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the One who put things present into that list, so that the very thing you are standing in tonight would already be named and already be answered before you ever got there.

Read the list again. It does not say a quiet season is the exception. There is no exception written into it, and there was never a version of that verse with a clause about people whose prayers get no reply.

The psalm that never brightens

Open Psalm 88 some night when the shop is shut. It is not long.

A man writes to God about being in the lowest pit and being counted with those who go down to the grave. He says he cries out day and night. And then it ends, and here is the thing almost nobody notices about it: it does not brighten. There is no turn at the end. The last line is about darkness being the one companion he has left, and that is where the psalm stops.

God kept that in the songbook. He did not tidy it. He did not append a resolution to it so that it would preach better. He left a prayer that got no answer inside His own worship book, in the middle of the collection, for everybody to sing.

You are holding something the written word takes completely seriously, and it is not being marked down. Psalm 22:2 says I cry by day, but You do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest, and the Lord Jesus took the first line of that same psalm onto the cross with Him, and the Holy Spirit is the One who kept both of them in the record so that a woman at a till at twenty to ten would know she is in company and not in error.

Whatever the silence is, it is not evidence against you. The Son of God said the sentence you are afraid to say, out loud, at the top of His voice, and heaven did not correct Him for it.

Near is not a wage

There is a suspicion that grows in the quiet and I want to take it out and look at it, because I think it is the actual weight and not the meter.

It goes like this: He has gone quiet on me because of something. Something I did, or did not do, or did not have. And underneath that: closeness is a thing I have to keep paying for, and I have fallen behind.

That is not how any of this works, and I am not softening it to be kind. You are as near to God tonight as you were on your best morning, and the nearness was never a wage. Hebrews 13:5 has Him saying I will never leave you nor forsake you, and it is His own word about His own conduct, not a rate you are keeping up with, and His Spirit lives in you (1 Corinthians 3:16) on the nights you feel absolutely nothing at all.

You have not been struck off anything. What you have is a quiet, and a quiet is not a verdict, and nobody, including me, is authorized to read one out of it.