The Wrong Size Bracket, Again

Third time in a fortnight. Same shop, same counter, same small paper bag with the receipt folded inside it because he keeps the receipts now, on account of the first two.

It is one of those hardware shops that has not changed since about 1974 and has everything. Wooden drawers up the back wall with handwritten labels. A man behind the counter with a pencil behind his ear who has been there long enough to know what most people are going to ask before they finish asking it. A smell of paraffin and dust and the sawdust off the key cutter.

He puts the bracket on the counter and says, I have done it again.

And the man behind the counter says, without looking up, that everybody does, and that the ones on the shelf are mislabeled and have been for two years, and that he has told them, and takes it back, and finds the right one in about four seconds from a drawer that has no obvious relationship to the thing it contains.

That is the whole transaction. Eleven seconds. Entirely kind.

And walking back to the car he runs the thing he always runs, which is a full account of what that man must think of him, delivered in his own voice, at length, with supporting evidence going back years.

The man behind the counter has already forgotten. He is talking to somebody about a hinge.

If you know that walk to the car, sit down here with me, and let me be clear about who I am speaking to. Today I am speaking to the one who did something, a long way back, and took it to God straight and meant every syllable, and has had a voice going ever since that never once goes quiet.

I am not going to tell you off for it

First thing, and I want it said before anything else.

I am not going to call this pride. Somebody probably has. There is a fashion for telling a man that thinking poorly of himself is just the other side of the same coin, and it is a clever line and it is not much use to a man who has been at this since he was young.

And I am not going to argue the entries with you. You know your own record better than I do and you can produce evidence faster than I can answer it, because you have had years of practice and I have had a paragraph.

What I am going to do is read you a verse and let you hear what is actually in it.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Now. Four things God is doing in that sentence and not one of them is assessing.

He is in the midst. He is saving. He is rejoicing over. And in the middle of it, one clause that most translations soften and that is worth having plainly: he will rest in his love. The Hebrew is closer to he will be quiet in his love. Silent. Still. Not saying anything.

Read that again with a running commentary going in your head, because that is the point.

You are loved by a God who is quiet in it, and you were never being narrated by Him. I am not offering you a comfort. The written word puts God's silence and God's singing in one verse and puts no assessment anywhere in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it in under a voice that has been talking since a man was twenty.

The quiet one and the loud one

Here is what I want you to take out to the car.

There are two things going on when you walk away from that counter. One of them is loud, detailed, well evidenced, and it never stops. The other is quiet.

For most of your life you have assumed the loud one is God's, or near enough to His to be worth listening to, because it is the one that sounds like a verdict and verdicts come from above.

It is not His. His is the quiet one, and the only time He raises His voice in that verse is to sing.

That is a strange thing to be told and I would not blame you for finding it hard to place. A man who has been narrated for thirty years does not have a category for quiet, and often mistakes it for absence.

You are being sung over by God at the exact moment the other voice is at its loudest, and you were never listening to Him when you listened to that. Scripture puts the singing in God's mouth in that verse and puts nothing else there, and it is His Spirit, not a decision made in a car park, who lets a man hear a quiet thing under a loud one.