The Twenty Years Before This Year

The fellowship hall smells the way every fellowship hall smells, and the cleanup is basically over.

Four folding tables still up, one stack of chairs not put away, and the coffee urn with the orange handle draining into a mop sink somebody will regret. Late October light through the high windows, lying long and yellow across the floor tiles. Somebody's kid riding a scooter down the middle of the room and being told twice.

He got handed the box nobody wanted, which is the box of old directories. Spiral bound, one for every couple of years, and the job is to keep two of each and recycle the rest.

He is forty four. He flips one open with his thumb, and there in the group photograph on the middle spread, third row, left of the man who used to run the sound, is himself at twenty four.

Same building. Same hall he is standing in. Younger, thinner, hair he no longer has, a tie somebody made him wear.

And he stands there holding it, because in March of this year, at a kitchen table, with a man he barely knew and a cup of coffee going cold, something happened. Not new information. He knew the information. He could have taught it. Something else, and it went all the way down, and he has been a different man walking around in the same life ever since.

Twenty years.

That is what he is holding. He counted offering in this room. He set up these tables. He sat through his father's funeral in the sanctuary next door with his hand on his mother's back, and he did not have then what he has now, and he cannot get that afternoon back to do it again.

His kids were small in that photograph. His marriage went through a bad stretch in there. And every one of those Sundays he was here, in the third row, on time, and it did not land.

He puts the directory back in the box. He does not know what to do with his face.

The scooter goes by again. Somebody is asking whether the tables go against the wall or in the closet.

You know the photograph. Yours might be a directory, or a video of a wedding, or a folding chair you can point to. And you know the arithmetic that arrives with it, the one that has a number in it, and how much it costs to stand in a room holding the number.

Now was never a deadline

I have to take a verse back off somebody before we can use it, because it has been used on people like a stopwatch for about a hundred years.

Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.2 Corinthians 6:2

That has been shouted at a lot of frightened people to make them move fast. Read it in its place and it is doing almost the opposite.

Paul is quoting Isaiah, where God tells His servant that in an acceptable time He heard him and in a day of salvation He helped him. Then Paul looks up at the people in front of him and says, in effect, look what time it is. The window God spoke about is standing open. That is a statement about God's posture, not a countdown on a man's life.

And here is what that does to the box of directories. Now was true on every one of those twenty Sundays. True the year of the photograph, true through the bad stretch, true in the row at his father's funeral, and true at four in the afternoon with a scooter going by.

You are standing in front of a door that has been open the entire time, and the verse everybody uses as a stopwatch is the one that says so. 2 Corinthians 6:2 announces an accepted time rather than a closing one, and it is His Spirit who makes a sentence like that a present fact in a room instead of a threat over one.

You were never late to something that has no closing hour, and Scripture is the ground for that and not a kind opinion of mine. Paul takes the word now out of Isaiah, where God is describing His own readiness to help, and it is the Spirit, not the calendar, who applies a word like that to a man of forty four holding a photograph of himself at twenty four.

Nobody is billing you for the standing

Now to the parable that I would read out loud in that hall if they let me.

A householder goes out at daybreak and hires men for his vineyard. Again at nine, at noon, at three. And then at five, with one hour of daylight left, he goes out one more time and finds men still standing there.

And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.Matthew 20:6-7

Read the exchange slowly, because everybody rushes to the wages at the end and skips the part that matters this afternoon.

He asks why they have been standing there all day. And they give him an answer, and it is not an excuse. Because no man hath hired us. That is the plain fact of their day. They showed up to the marketplace where work gets handed out. They stood where a man stands. Nothing happened.

And the householder does not argue with it. No suggestion that they should have tried harder or stood in a different line. He says go, and off they go with an hour of light left.

You are hearing a Lord who took that answer at face value and did not charge a man for the hours he stood in the marketplace, and the text is right there. Matthew 20:7 has the men saying nobody hired them and the householder simply sending them into the vineyard, and it is the same Spirit who moved that parable into the record who is moving in a fellowship hall in October.

Twenty years in the third row is a man standing in the marketplace. It is the right marketplace. It is where the work gets handed out. Whatever was or was not happening in those years, the parable does not hand him an invoice for them, and neither will I.

You have work handed to you for the hours that are left, and the whole point of the eleventh hour men is that the handing out is the householder's business. Matthew 20 has him going out five separate times because that is his nature, and it is the Spirit who does the sending now, which is a load nobody standing in a marketplace was ever asked to carry himself.

Twenty years He kept the record of

Now the honest part, and I would sit down on the edge of a table for this one.

The grief is real. I will not talk you out of it and I would think less of both of us if I tried. There was an afternoon in that sanctuary with your hand on your mother's back, and you would give a great deal to walk back into that room as the man who left a kitchen in March. You cannot. That is a genuine loss and it deserves to be called one.

What I will not do is let anybody hand you a bill for it, and I will not tell you the years ahead have been scheduled to be unusually fruitful to make the math come out. Nobody knows that, and a man who says it is writing checks on an account he does not hold.

Here is what I will say, and it is better than either.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

That is David, and it is one of the most tender lines in the whole book. God keeps a record of the wandering. He collects the tears. He does not skim past the years a man was in the room and did not know.

You are grieving something God Himself has on file, and that is why the grief is safe to say out loud. Psalm 56:8 has Him numbering the wanderings and keeping the tears, and it is the Spirit who is called the Comforter precisely because there is something real in the room to be comforted about.