The App I Open on the Landing

It happens at the top of the stairs, by the window, and it takes about nine seconds including the fingerprint.

Every morning. Before he goes down. Before the kettle, before the dog, before he has said anything to anybody.

And again at night, sitting on the edge of the bed with the light off, which he tells himself is a different thing because it is one handed and quick.

Here is the difficulty, and he has known it for a while and has never said it to a living soul.

The money is fine.

It is genuinely fine. There is a mortgage and it is manageable. There is a pension and it is not spectacular but it exists. His wife works, he works, the car is old and paid for, and there is enough in the account on the eighteenth of the month that any reasonable person would call it comfortable.

And he checks it twice a day, and the number is always what he already knew it would be, and looking at it does something for about ninety seconds and then the ninety seconds runs out.

There was a period, eleven years ago, when the number was not fine, and he has never talked about that period much either. It ended. Everybody came through. Nobody in the house except him remembers it as anything other than the year they had the small Christmas.

He is fifty two and he opens an app on a landing twice a day, and if you asked him what he is checking for he could not tell you, because whatever he is checking for is not in that app.

You know that landing. Yours might be a different screen. It might be a lock you check twice, or a boiler pressure gauge, or a scale in a bathroom. There is a number somewhere in your house that you consult like an oracle, and it always says the same thing, and you have never once been able to explain what you are asking it.

Come down and sit in the kitchen. Leave the phone up there for a minute. There is a line written by a man in the ruins of a burnt city, and it is about mornings.

There is no code, and there are new mercies

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 hold a man like you with a hint of one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that guarantees a balance, and nothing here is a technique. And I want to say the second thing plainly, as a pastor, because this article is easy to hear wrongly: if your money is not fine, if the checking is because there is genuinely something to check, then this piece is not aimed at you and you are not being told to relax. This one is for the man who has enough and is still on the landing.

Here is the line, and it matters enormously who wrote it. The book of Lamentations is somebody sitting in the ruins of Jerusalem after it burnt. Not a man in a good season being poetic.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

New every morning. He is not describing a stock. He is describing a delivery.

And notice where he says it from. If anybody had grounds to describe God's supply as depleted, it was that man in that city in that week. What he says instead is that there is a fresh consignment every single morning, and that the evidence for it is that he is still here at all.

That is a completely different arrangement from the one you are checking for. You go to the landing looking for a reserve. He is describing a morning delivery. A reserve is something you look at. A delivery is something you receive.

You are not going to find peace in a stock, and what is actually new at the top of those stairs arrives rather than accumulates. That is not a comfort I have arranged over the kettle. It is written in Lamentations 3, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written in a burnt city and lays it on a landing at ten past six.

You have today, and today is met, and it was delivered this morning rather than saved up. Scripture says they are new every morning, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a thing a man receives rather than a phrase he has heard on a calendar.

Now let me say the true thing, because I have sat with a great many men your age and this is where it lands.

You are not checking a balance. You are checking whether the eleven year old year has come back.

That is what the app is for. It is a scan. Every morning your body asks the same question, which is: is it happening again, and the app gives an answer that satisfies the question for about ninety seconds, and then the question re forms, because the question is not really about money and no number can answer it.

And you have never told anybody. Not your wife, who came through that year beside you. Eleven years of a private scan, twice a day, in a house where everybody else has moved on.

You are not a fearful man, and a body that keeps watch after a hard year is not a body that lacks faith. Scripture says God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, and that word sound is about a mind restored rather than a mind that never took a hit, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a restoration like that feel available on an ordinary Tuesday.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because eleven years of a habit does not stop because a friend was warm to you over tea. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what checking never does. So speak, out loud, on your own landing. You have the standing to speak to a habit in your own house and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by security, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a windowsill.