The Hour He Used to Fill

The courtyard is at its best in the hour after the heat goes, and everybody in the house knows it, which is why everybody in the house is out in it.

There is a lamp on the wall that somebody has just lit. There is mint in a glass and a plate of dates going down faster than anybody will admit. Two of the children are conducting a serious argument about a lizard. The gate is open, because the gate is always open at this hour, and the lane comes in over the wall: a bicycle, a woman calling somebody in, a radio two houses down playing something old.

He is sitting against the wall with his back to the warm stone, and he is fine.

That is the honest report and he would give it himself. He is fine. He is home. He has been here every evening for eleven months, and anybody in this courtyard would tell you it is the best thing that has happened to this family in years, and they would be right.

And between the lamp being lit and the meal being called, there is an hour.

It is the hour. It is the exact hour he used to give to the thing he does not do anymore. Not roughly the same hour. The same one, the same shape, beginning when the light goes off the top of the far wall and ending when his wife calls in from the kitchen, and his body knows it the way a body knows a stair in the dark.

He does not want it back. Let me be plain about that, because it is the strangest part and the part that has nobody to tell. He is not fighting anything. He does not miss it and he would not go back for anything in this world. That fight is over and God won it, and it is not the ache in this courtyard.

The ache is that the hour is empty. It is a hole in the evening in exactly the shape of what used to be in it, and nobody knows about that either, because how do you say to people who are this glad for you that the best hour of your day has nothing in it.

He knows what he was bought out of. He could tell you in one sentence and it would be accurate.

He has never once, in eleven months, thought about what he was bought for.

Tonight there is somebody at the gate. It is the old woman from the top of the lane, standing in the gateway with her stick, a little embarrassed. She has to go up, and she does not like the lane in the half dark anymore, and she has been at her own door for a while working up to coming down and asking.

So he gets up. He walks her up the lane, slowly, because she goes slowly, and she talks the whole way about a dispute over a wall settled sixty years ago, and he comes back down in the dark with the lamps on behind the windows.

He gets back as his wife calls in from the kitchen.

The hour is gone. He did not notice it going. That has not happened in eleven months, and he stands in his own gateway for a second working out what is different, and cannot quite get hold of it.

You know that hour. There is something you came out of, and you are out, and you would not go back. And there is a space in your week the exact shape of it, and you have been sitting in it grateful and empty at once, and you have never said so out loud, because everybody around you is so pleased and you would not know how to say it without sounding ungrateful.

Out of, and into

I keep doors, arrivals and departures, and there is a thing I see at the departures side more than anywhere else. A person gets free of something. They are genuinely free. And then they stand at the gate with nothing in their hands, because getting out was the whole of what they were told about, and nobody ever mentioned that there was a destination on the ticket.

Redemption in Scripture is never only a coming out. It has two halves and the second one is written into the same sentences as the first, and we have been reading past it for years.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.1 Peter 2:9

Look at the middle of it. That you may. Every title in that verse is followed by a purpose, and the purpose is not a condition attached to the titles, it is what the titles are for. Chosen, and royal, and holy, and His own possession, so that something happens in a courtyard in the early evening.

You are a royal priesthood, and that is a description of what you are for and not a badge for what you came out of. That is not my flattery laid over your evening. Scripture puts the purpose in the same breath as the title, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the warmth of my sentence, who makes a phrase written to scattered people in a hard century arrive in a house where the gate is open.

And notice where He called you out of and where He called you into. Out of darkness. Into light. Not out of darkness and into a corridor. Into a lit place where people can see each other's faces and work gets done, which is a description of an evening rather than of an escape.

You have been brought into something, and the empty hour in your week is not the leftover shape of what you left, it is unassigned ground. It is written that you are His own possession for a purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a hole in an evening into a place with something in it.

And it is not repayment

Now I have to close the trap that this whole site exists to close, because everything above can be turned into the exact thing we have spent seven messages taking off you.

Here is the trap. A person hears they were bought for a purpose, and within a minute they have converted the purpose into a repayment. He gave me all this, so the least I can do is. I have been handed a second half of my life, so I had better make it count. It sounds like gratitude and it is arithmetic, and it puts a man back to paying nightly on something that was settled without him.

You are not being handed a purpose in order to work something off, and there is nothing outstanding for the rest of your life to service. Scripture says it is finished and that He obtained eternal redemption, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can put a calling into a man's hands without putting a weight on his back.

The difference is easy to feel once you know to look for it. A repayment looks over its shoulder. It is measured against what you came out of, so the worse the thing you left, the more you think you owe, and a man with a hard history ends up with a heavier life than a man with a mild one, which is a monstrous idea and God has never once had it.

A purpose looks forward. It is not measured against your history at all. It was assigned by somebody who was not consulting the record when He assigned it.

And the record does stand. Eleven months does not undo the years before them, and nobody here is going to pretend those years away or tell you they were secretly useful. They happened. The record stands and the verdict is changed, and both are true in the same courtyard, and the purpose sits on the far side of the verdict and not on the far side of the record.

You have a calling that was never sized against your worst season, and it was not adjusted downward when God looked at your history. His word says the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a man a lane to walk in the half dark without once mentioning where he has been.