Boots Off, Heater Ticking

The heater in that room is the sort that ticks for about four minutes after somebody turns it on and then does nothing else audible for the rest of the evening, and no man who has ever used that changing room has been able to tell you whether it works.

Thursdays. Five a side, eight o'clock, ten of them if everybody turns up and nine if the lad with the van is working. Afterward it is the bench, and boots off, and the particular quality of talk that happens between men who have just run about for an hour and are too tired to be careful.

It is good talk. It goes places. Somebody's father is not well. Somebody has had a rough few months at work and says so more plainly than he would have said it in a car park. There is a long-running dispute about whether the goal at the far end is smaller. There is a lad of twenty-two who has just found out he is going to be a father and has told them before he has told his own mother, which everybody understands perfectly and nobody remarks on.

He is always laced up and gone by the time it gets going.

Not obviously. He is quick, that is all. Boots off, shoes on, bag zipped, see you next week lads, and out into the car park while the rest of them are still sitting there with their socks in their hands. Eleven years. Nobody has ever thought a thing about it, because he is a quick man and a private man and there is no crime in either.

He would tell you he is a private man. He has told himself that for eleven years and it has served him well.

Sit down on the bench here with me a minute, and let me say the sentence that matters most before anything else. I am not going to ask you to tell anybody. Not tonight, not one day when you are stronger, not as the grown up version of this. I will not guess what it is and I am not going to offer you a list. Nothing in this wants the thing itself, and a man who never tells another living soul is a whole man and a whole reader of this site.

Two residence words, right at the front

Psalm 91 is the one people put on cards, and almost everybody starts reading it at the second verse, which is where the rescuing language begins.

Go back one.

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.Psalm 91:1

Now look at the two verbs, because the whole psalm hangs on them and they are both the same kind of word.

Dwelleth. That is a residence. That is where a man lives, gets his post, keeps his boots by the door.

Abide. That is staying. Remaining. Not passing through, not ducking in out of the weather and going again.

Neither of those is a hiding word. Neither of them is quick. The entire promise of that psalm, all the rest of it, the pestilence and the arrow and the ten thousand at your right hand, is written for a man who lives somewhere, and it is not written for a man who keeps darting in.

You are given an address rather than an exit, and you were offered a place to live rather than a place to duck. That is not my encouragement. The written word chooses two residence verbs and puts them in front of everything else in that psalm, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a man with his bag already zipped.

Private is a fine word and it has been doing another job

I want to be careful here, because I am not about to take a good word off you.

A man is allowed to be private. There is no obligation on any person to lay their life out on a bench for other men, and the ones who do it constantly are not more spiritual, they are just louder. Keeping a thing that is yours to keep is not a sin and I will not have it called one.

But privacy is a choice a man makes about what he says. What you have been doing is a choice about where you are, and the two have been welded together for eleven years, and they were never the same thing.

You can be the most private man in that room and still be in it.

You are permitted to stay in a room without handing over one word, and you have that permission already rather than at the end of some process. Scripture never once makes a man's welcome depend on what he discloses, and it is His Spirit, not a decision made with a bag on your shoulder, who lets a private man sit back down.