Under the Lamp Post at Seven

They meet under the third lamp post along from the park gates because it is the only one on that stretch that has ever worked reliably, and it became the meeting point about nine years ago for that reason and has stayed it out of pure habit.

Mondays, seven. Eleven or twelve of them. Two groups, one that goes off fast and one that does not, and everybody is very clear that neither of those is the better group, and everybody knows which is which.

There is a woman who has run every Monday for eleven years and has never once been the fastest and has never once cared. There is a man who talks the entire way round and is the reason half of them keep coming. There is a rule that nobody waits at the top of the hill, which was made to stop people feeling bad and which everybody breaks.

She ran with them for four years.

Since the autumn she has not been. It is nearly a year, and it is not the running, because she still runs, on her own, at half past nine at night, on the roads with nobody on them.

The reason is not something she did. It is what another person did, a long way back, that came up again in a hard autumn. And what it left her with is not a memory. It is more like a garment. It is on her when she wakes up, she can feel it in a queue, and she has never in her life been able to get it off by herself.

Let me say who I am speaking to before anything else. Today I am speaking to you, the one whose weight belongs entirely to what somebody else did. I am not going to ask you what it was, and nothing here wants the thing itself.

And before you brace: nobody here is setting you a pace. Stopping is not a sin, this site will not call it one, and there is no timetable in this message.

Both verbs are His

There is a line in Psalm 30 that is quoted constantly for its first half, and the second half is where the whole mechanism sits.

Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness.Psalm 30:11

Thou hast put off my sackcloth. Read whose hands are in that clause.

Sackcloth is not a mood. It is a garment. It was worn on the outside, it was coarse and deliberately uncomfortable, and the entire point of it was that it announced a state to everybody who saw you. You did not have to say anything. The cloth said it.

And David does not say that he took it off. He says God did. The verb is God's, and the person wearing it is the object of the sentence.

Then the second half. Girded me with gladness. Girding is a dressing word, and it is done to somebody. Again God's hands, again David as the one being dressed.

Two garments, two actions, both of them His.

You are being undressed and re-dressed by God's own hands, and you were never expected to get that thing off by yourself. I am not offering you a tender image. The written word puts both verbs in God's mouth and puts the wearer in the accusative, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a woman running alone at half past nine at night.

You never put it on

And now the thing I most want you to take away, because it is precise and it matters.

Sackcloth was normally chosen. A person put it on to signal grief or repentance, deliberately, in public.

Yours was not chosen. It was put on you by what somebody else did, and you have worn it since without ever once having agreed to it, and that is a different thing from every other person in Scripture who wore that cloth.

Which means the removing is even less your job than it was David's. You did not put it on. Nothing in you is required to take it off. The only hands that have ever been able to reach that garment are the ones the psalm names.

You are wearing something you never chose, and you were never the one who could reach the fastening. Scripture keeps the taking off entirely in God's hands there, and it is His Spirit, not an effort you make on a Monday evening, who does the unfastening.