Five Weeks and a Coffee Cup

The tickets were bought in one go on her friend's card, because that is how it works when two of you are in a queue online at nine in the morning and only one of you has the app that goes through.

That was in April. It is now nearly the end of a different season entirely.

She has said, twice, that she will sort it on payday. The first time she meant it completely. The second time she meant it, and then the car needed the thing, and then it was the birthday weekend, and then it was just gone, the way money is just gone, and she has not said anything since.

Five paydays.

Here is the part she cannot get out of her head. She posts things. Everybody posts things. And there was one from a Saturday, outside a place with the good tables on the pavement, and she is laughing and there is a coffee cup in her hand, and she has looked at that photograph about nine times since, from her friend's point of view, and it is unbearable.

The coffee was under three pounds. It is not the coffee. It is what the coffee says to a person who is waiting, which is: I am fine, and you are still waiting.

And every day it gets a little worse and a little harder to open, so she does not open it. Her friend has never once asked. Not one message. That is what makes it awful, and it is also, if she looked at it properly, the kindest thing anybody has done for her all year.

You know that photograph. Yours might be a car outside your house. It might be a holiday you went on. It might be nothing at all except a long silence where a sentence should have been. And the amount is probably not the point, and everybody involved knows it is not the point, and it goes on anyway.

Sit down for a second. Put the phone on the table face up. I want to say one thing to you that is not what you are expecting.

There is no code, and there is a today

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to keep you here hoping for one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that makes money appear so that you can settle this before Friday. And I want to be careful right at the start, because this category gets preached badly and people get hurt: if you genuinely cannot pay, you cannot pay, and that is not sin and it is not failure and nothing in this article is going to tell you otherwise.

But that is not actually where you are, and you know it, which is why the photograph hurts.

Paul writes one line about this and it is short.

Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.Romans 13:8

Now look at what he does with it. He does not build a repayment policy. He puts owing and loving in the same breath, and the second half explains the first: the reason not to leave something owing between you and a person is that the thing between you is meant to be love, and an unspoken debt is a very effective way of putting something else there instead.

That is what has happened between you and her. Not a debt. A silence, with a debt in it.

You are not in trouble here, and the thing that has gone wrong between you is not the money. That is not a soft reading I have invented for a hard week. It is the plain sense of Romans 13, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an apostle's short line and lays it beside a photograph you have looked at nine times.

You have a God who has never once required you to have the money before you are allowed to be honest. Scripture puts honesty and love together and says nothing at all about your balance, and His Spirit is the one who makes a written line into something a person can do today.

Now let me name what is actually holding you, because I have been exactly here.

You are not avoiding the payment. You are avoiding the sentence. Because the sentence has to say I still cannot, and it has to say it after five paydays, and by now it feels like it has to be accompanied by a good explanation, and every day that passes the explanation has to be better, and there is no explanation good enough for five, so you say nothing, and the silence keeps growing the thing it is trying to hide.

And underneath that, something smaller and more honest: you are afraid that saying it out loud makes you the sort of person who does this. You are not. This is the shape avoidance takes in a person who cares what somebody thinks of them.

You are not the sort of person who does this, and a delay is not a description of your character. Scripture says that God resisteth the proud but giveth grace unto the humble, and grace is exactly what comes toward a person the moment they stop constructing an explanation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that word grace land warm rather than theoretical.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because five weeks does not end because you felt convicted about it in a nice way. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what intending never does. So say it out loud first, here, and then send it. You have the standing to speak to a thing that has been running you and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position rather than your record, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a kitchen table.