Told to Be Sensible

The case lives under the window in the front room, and it has lived there for eleven years, and before that it lived in a loft in a different house, and before that in the bottom of a wardrobe.

It is not hidden. That is what visitors never quite understand. It is right there, in the light, under the window with the net curtain, and there are two dents in the carpet where the feet of it sit, and when the carpet was replaced he made sure it went back in the same place. Brass catches gone dull. One corner scuffed pale where it has been set down on ten thousand hard floors. A luggage label on the handle, faded to nothing, from a journey he could still describe to you in detail.

He is fifty-seven. He dusts the top of the case when he does the sill. He has never once opened it in this house.

What is inside is the thing he was best at. Not one of the things. The thing. And he was not deluded about it: he was told, by people who had no reason to flatter him, that he had something. He knew what it felt like to be doing it and to be entirely, exactly himself, which is a feeling most people get about four times in a life and he could get on a Tuesday.

Then he was seventeen, and there was a room with a desk in it, and a man he respected sat on the edge of that desk with his arms folded and was kind to him. That is the part people leave out. It was not cruelty. The man was kind, and he was serious, and he said, look. Be sensible. It is a lovely thing. It is not a life. You are a clever lad and you have a head on you, and you want something steady, and you will thank me in twenty years.

And he sat there in a chair that was slightly too low and he said, yes sir. He agreed. Nobody held his hand and moved it. He said yes, and he went home, and within eighteen months it was over, and he was steady, and he has been steady ever since. Forty years of steady. Two children, a good marriage, a house with a front room in it, and a case under the window.

He did thank him, once, at a reunion. He remembers saying it and he remembers the exact quality of the silence inside himself while he said it.

Now he is fifty-seven and he dusts the top of the case, and every so often his thumb rests on a catch for a second and then he takes his hand away and goes and puts the kettle on.

You have something like that, and it is almost certainly not in a case, and I am not going to guess at it and I am not going to ask. Yours may not even have an object. It may be a way you used to be, that somebody sensible advised you out of, and you agreed, and you have been agreeing ever since. And the strange part, the part that keeps it stuck, is that you cannot even be angry, because it was said kindly, and because you said yes, and a man who said yes has no complaint to bring.

I want to show you an old man in Egypt, at the very end of his life, naming God in a way nobody in Scripture had named Him before.

The Angel which redeemed me from all evil

Jacob is a hundred and forty-seven and he is dying in a country that is not his. Joseph brings his two sons to the bed to be blessed, and the old man puts his hands out and says this.

The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and let my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth.Genesis 48:16

That is the first time in the whole of Scripture that God is named as the one who redeems a person. Not a nation, not a field, not a firstborn. Me. The Angel which redeemed me.

And look at who is saying it. This is not a man with a clean run behind him. Jacob spent his life losing things, and a great many of them he lost by his own hand, and he was old and he had told the king of Egypt to his face that his years had been few and hard. He is not standing there claiming it went well. He is naming what God had been across the whole of it: the near one who kept stepping in and taking back what had gone out.

You are the personal business of a Redeemer, and He was never a general policy applied to everybody at once. I am not laying a warm idea over your front room. It is written in Genesis 48:16 in the first person singular, the Angel which redeemed me, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a pronoun that small off a page and into a man of fifty-seven with a duster in his hand.

Now hold the word steady, because it is doing exact work. To redeem is to buy back what has gone out of the family. It presumes a going out. It does not presume a theft. The one with the standing to act does not stand at the door asking whether the thing left by force or by agreement, because his office is not to establish fault, it is to bring back. You are not disqualified by the fact that you agreed, and no clause anywhere makes agreement the one thing that cannot be undone. Scripture says He redeems us from all iniquity and purifies to Himself a people of His own, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a definition that dry and turns it into a hand on a catch.

What happens in a room with a desk in it

There is something I have to say plainly here, because half the people reading this have spent decades filing something under their own free decision that never belonged in that file.

You were seventeen. He was forty and he sat on the desk with his arms folded and he was kind and he was certain, and certainty in an adult is the heaviest thing in a room to a young person. You did not weigh it. You could not weigh it. You had nothing to weigh it against, and every signal in that room said this is what a wise man does, and so you said yes sir, and you meant it.

That was not a free trade. Being worn down is not the same as choosing, being leaned on by somebody you respected is not the same as deciding, and a young person agreeing with the only voice of authority in the room is not a negotiation. A pushed signature is not a signature. You were not as free in that chair as you have held yourself responsible for being, and God has always known exactly what was in that room. It is written that the Lord knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and His Spirit is the one who can tell a man the difference between what he chose and what he was steered into.

And I will not tidy the forty years away either, because they are real and some of them were good. Two children. A good marriage. Steady. The record stands. What changes is the verdict written beside it, and the verdict is not that a foolish boy threw his life away and it is not that a sensible man made his bed. You have been bought back by the One who puts His own name on what He takes, and He took the whole of it, the desk and the yes and the forty years included. Genesis 48:16 says the Redeemer's name is named on what He redeems, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old man's blessing land on a room with a net curtain in it.

So here is the one thing being handed back to you, and I want it small and exact rather than grand. The thing you were best at. Not a career made out of it, not an audience for it, not the years back. The thing itself, in your hands, with nobody's permission required and no case to argue for why a person of your age would bother.