The Years I Sent It In

She was after the good scissors, which live in that cupboard, and there was a shoebox behind the tablecloths.

She knew what it was before she opened it. She had put it there.

Eleven years of it. Not the money, the envelopes. The reply envelopes, the ones that come with the letter, with the little window and the line where you write what you are sending. She had kept them, because that was her nature, and because there was a period when she was keeping records of everything after her husband died and the habit did not stop.

She sat down on the floor in front of that cupboard with the box on her lap. Seventy nine years old and down on a carpet, and her knees complained the whole way.

It went out every month. Not much. Never much. It came out of a pension and it went to a program she watched at half past three, and the man on it was warm and prayed for people by name and read the letters out sometimes, and once he read out something that could have been hers and she was not sure and she never quite stopped hoping it was.

She was not gullible. She would like that written down somewhere. She raised four children and buried a husband and ran a shop for nineteen years and she can spot a chancer at forty paces.

She sent it because at half past three in the afternoon, in a very quiet house, somebody prayed out loud in her front room, and for eleven years that was the only voice that did.

And on that carpet, with the box on her lap, she cried about it, and what she said out loud was: what a stupid old woman.

You know that cupboard. Yours might not be a television program. It might be a magazine you kept renewing, or a monthly thing you set up in a hard year, or a place you gave to because somebody said your name. And the shame is not really about the money either.

Come and sit up here in the chair, and let us have the box on the table where we can both see it. There is a story about a father who ran, and it is not about money at all.

There is no code, and there is a father who ran

Let me say it plain first, because the name over this door promises a secret and I am not going to put one more thing through that letterbox.

There is no code. What went out every month did not open anything and did not have to, and there is no version of those eleven years where a different amount would have made a different life.

And here is what I am not going to do. I am not going to spend this afternoon on the man on the television. I do not know him and neither do you, and I will tell you plainly that your peace cannot be made out of his being a fraud, because that would mean the whole of your eleven years turns into a story about him. And they were not about him. They were yours.

Here is the story, and everybody remembers the wrong part of it.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

Now. That son had a speech. He had worked it out in a field, word for word, and it was a good speech, and it was true, and it had a line in it about not being worthy to be called a son.

And he never gets to finish it.

The father is not at the door. He is not indoors being told. He is watching a road, which means he had been watching that road, and when a shape appears a great way off, in the distance, before there is any speech at all, before he can possibly know what condition the boy is in or what he is going to say, the old man picks up his robe and runs.

That is what God is like about a person coming home with something in their hands they are ashamed of.

You are not going to have to explain yourself, and He was running before you had the box on your lap. That is not a soft thing I am saying to be kind to an old woman. It is written in Luke 15, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a father on a road and lays it on a carpet in front of a cupboard.

You have a God who ran while you were still a great way off, and He has never once waited to hear the speech first. Scripture says he saw him and had compassion and ran, in that order, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old story land in a body at seventy nine.

Now let me say the true thing, since it is just us.

You did not say what a stupid old woman about the money. I have known you long enough to know that.

You said it about the loneliness. About the fact that for eleven years the only voice praying out loud in your front room came out of a television at half past three, and that you knew that, and that you sent money to it because it was the only one there.

That is the thing on that carpet. Not foolishness. A woman who missed the sound of somebody praying in her house.

You are not a stupid old woman, and wanting a voice praying in your front room was never something to be ashamed of. Scripture says God setteth the solitary in families, which is a plain admission that solitary is a real condition and that He does something about it rather than lecturing anybody for feeling it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and warms a room.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a shoebox does not stop being heavy because an old friend was kind about it. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what sitting on a carpet never does. So say it out loud, here. You have the standing to speak to a shame 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 and not by long faithfulness, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word further than a front room.