Nobody Would Ever Know

The chiller cabinets hum the way they always do, and somewhere down the far end a woman is giving a toddler a full running commentary on peas. Trolley wheels. A tannoy asking somebody to come to the front. An ordinary shop on an ordinary afternoon, and nothing at all happening in it.

She picks the thing up. She puts it in the trolley. Then, without deciding anything, her hand goes back in, lifts it out, and sets it neatly on the shelf where it came from.

And then she stands there.

Because she does not have to do that any more. Nothing in her life requires it. That was four hundred Thursdays of putting things back, and her hand learned it the way hands learn things, and nobody has thought to tell her hand that it is over. A man reaches past her for the bread and says sorry, love. The shop carries on. She is standing in the middle of an aisle with her palm flat on a cold shelf and her chest full of something she has no name for.

Then a woman she half knows from years back comes round the end of the aisle, delighted to see her, and says the kind thing. Look at you. Honestly, nobody would ever know.

She smiles and agrees, because it is meant well and because it is true.

And that is the sentence you take home with the shopping, love, and it is still sitting there at the end of the week. Nobody would ever know. Not what those years took out of you. Not what your hands learned. It is over and you are glad it is over, and there is a cost in you that does not show on you, and you have started to wonder whether you are even allowed to feel it.

Two true things in the middle of an ordinary day

Here is the first plain thing, and I am not going to dress it up, because you have had enough nice sentences handed to you lately. Scripture settles that in Psalm 31:15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

You are glad and you are sore, both at once, and that is not ingratitude. That is accuracy. Two weathers can stand in one person at the same time, and a heart that reports both of them is not a divided heart, it is an honest one. The woman in the aisle was not wrong to be delighted. You are not wrong to be tired in a place she cannot see. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 31:15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

The second plain thing is about what happens to a cost once it stops showing.

Nobody asks. That is what happens. While it was going on, people could see the shape of it, and they asked, and some of them helped. Now it looks well from the outside, so the asking stopped, and the only person left going over those years is you. So you go over them. In the aisle, on the stairs, at two in the afternoon for no reason at all. You are trying to make them come out even. You are trying to work out what they were for, so that you can file them somewhere and be finished and be a person who is properly grateful. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Psalm 31:15, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

And if somebody does tell you it was worth it in the end, they will mean it kindly, and they will be adding up a column they were never standing in. Nobody gets to write that total on your behalf. Not a well meaning woman in a supermarket, and not me. Whether those years were worth it is yours alone to say, or to leave unsaid for the rest of your life, and God is not standing over you waiting for the answer before He will come near.

Because here is where the years actually are.

My times are in thy hand.Psalm 31:15

Look at when a man wrote that down. Not on the far side of it, safe, with the trouble behind him. He wrote it with the trouble still in the room and no sign of it lifting. That is the whole weight of the sentence. My times. Plural. The lot of them. The flat ones and the frightening ones and this ordinary Thursday, every single one of them in the hand of God.

Which means those years were never yours to justify in the first place. They were in a hand. They are in it now.

And let me say something plainly to whoever is reading this from the middle rather than the far side, because you are here too. There is nothing in that verse about lateness, and there is nothing in this message that makes a long wait into a rule, a pattern, or a thing you can set your clock by. God is not a schedule and He is not slow. The sentence about the hand was written by a man in the thick of it, which means it is true of you tonight, before anything at all changes. You are not reading somebody else's good news through a window. It is the same hand. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 31:15, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

And to the one still standing in the aisle: the God who holds the years has not stopped being the God who does things. He did not lay the power down somewhere back in the old stories and leave us with the retelling. He moves in ordinary houses on ordinary afternoons, and He is not saving it for a better class of person than you. The sore place under your ribs is not too small to bring Him, and it is not too late to bring it, and He is not tired of hearing about it.