The Inbox I Still Check

It takes about forty seconds, including the two factor code, and he has done it on the first of every month for two years and four months.

The company is gone. There is an administrator's letter somewhere in a drawer that uses the phrase in the circumstances four times. There were eleven of them owed, and some of them got some of it, and he was one of the ones who did not, because of the order things happen in when a business goes down, which was explained to him kindly by a woman on a phone who was clearly reading it off a card.

The email still works. That is the thing. Nobody switched it off. So on the first of the month he logs into an account belonging to a company that does not exist and looks at an inbox where the last real message is from a Tuesday in the spring before last, and there is nothing, and he logs out.

He has stopped telling his wife when he does it.

And what he would say, if you pushed him, is that he is checking in case something came through. But he knows nothing is coming through. He has known that for at least eighteen months. So the checking is not really checking. It is the last thing he has that says: this happened to me, and it was wrong, and somebody somewhere ought to still be dealing with it.

Nine weeks of work. Two of those weeks he did on a bad back because they were short.

You know that login. Yours might be a folder of screenshots. It might be a number you could still recite. It might be a person's name you type into a search bar every so often, not to find anything, just to check that the world is still where you left it. Something was taken and nobody was ever held to it, and you have kept one small ritual going, and the ritual is the only justice that has ever been available.

Come and walk with me up the headland. The light is good and the wind will take some of this off you. I want to name what happened to you before I say a word about letting it go.

There is no code, and there is something you already hold

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and a man who has been robbed of nine weeks does not need one more clever thing waved at him.

There is no code. There is no arrangement of Scripture that gets your wages back out of a company that has been dissolved. Nothing here is a technique. And I will say the second thing just as plainly, because too many people skip it: what happened to you was wrong. That is not a feeling you should manage. It was work done and not paid for, and Scripture is angrier about that than most preachers are.

So I am not going to ask you to be gracious about the theft. I am going to show you where the letting go actually stands, because it does not stand on pretending.

There were believers in the first century who had their houses stripped, legally, by people with the power to do it, and the writer of Hebrews says this about them.

For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance.Hebrews 10:34

Read what carries that sentence, because it is not attitude. It is knowledge. They knew, in themselves, that they had something already, and that the something they had could not be taken by anybody with a court order or a creditors' list or a woman reading off a card.

They were not letting go because the loss was small. The loss was their houses. They were letting go because their actual holdings were somewhere no administrator could reach, and they knew it the way you know your own name.

You are not letting go of the last thing you own, and there is something in your hands already that nobody can put on a list. That is not a comfort I have arranged for a man on a headland. It is written into Hebrews 10, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about stripped houses and lays it beside a dead inbox on the first of the month.

You have a better and an enduring substance, and it was never in that payroll. Scripture says knowing in yourselves, which is a phrase about certainty and not about mood, and His Spirit is the one who turns a written fact into something a man can feel in his chest walking uphill.

Now let me name the low place, because you would know if I skipped it.

The checking is not about money. If somebody handed you the nine weeks tomorrow you would take it and it would help and it would not touch this. What the ritual is holding is the record. As long as you log in, it is still an open matter. Stop logging in, and it becomes a thing that happened and was absorbed, and you become a man who worked nine weeks for nothing and nobody ever answered for it, and that is a very hard sentence to say about yourself.

You are not the man who let it go unnoticed, and nothing about that inbox is holding the record. Scripture says that the hire of the laborers kept back by fraud cries out, and that the cry has already reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, which means the record was filed by somebody else long before you started checking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient line do that work in a body.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because two years and four months of a ritual does not stop because a friend was decent to you on a walk. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what quiet endurance never does. So say it out loud up here where the wind is. You have the standing to speak to a thing that was taken 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 suffering, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word out further than the water.