Gather Up The Fragments

Everybody has gone except the two who always stay, and they are in the kitchen arguing about a football result from 2011.

He is out at the long table with a stack of plates, doing the part he has quietly taken as his own over the last few years, which is the clearing. He is good at it. He is fast and he does not need to be asked and he knows which bowls go inside which.

The table looks the way a table looks at that point in the night. Bread ends. Three glasses with about a centimeter left in each. A plate somebody used as an ashtray for a candle. A child's cardigan on the back of a chair.

And he is not thinking about any of it. He is thinking about the photograph on the wall in the hallway, which has thirty-one people in it, taken at a christening, and he is not in it.

Seven years. Between the ages of about twenty-six and thirty-three he was not at this table. Some of that was distance and work. Some of it was a stretch of his life that everybody in that kitchen knows about and nobody brings up, and he is grateful for that and it also means it has never once been said out loud in this house.

Nobody blames him. That is the honest truth and he knows it and it does not help.

The sentence arrives with the third stack of plates: there are seven years of this family that happened without me, and there is no way to get them back or pay for them.

You know that sentence. It might be years away, or years present but not really there, or a stretch when something else had all of you. There is a table somewhere that went on without you, and you have never found a way to account for it, so you have found a way to be useful at it instead.

He gave an order about leftovers

There is a detail after the feeding of the five thousand that almost nobody preaches, and it is one sentence, and Jesus is the one who says it.

When they were filled, he said unto his disciples, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.John 6:12

Think about what that is. He has just fed a hillside out of nothing. Bread is not the issue. Scarcity has been publicly and comprehensively dealt with, and then, in the quiet afterwards, He turns and gives an instruction about the bits.

That nothing be lost. Not because the bits were needed. Because losing things is not how He operates.

You are inside a work of God whose stated habit is that nothing gets lost, and that habit covers the seven years as thoroughly as it covers tonight. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft reading I chose for a man with a stack of plates, and the Holy Spirit who is with you at this table is the evidence that no part of your life has ever been written off as scraps.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic you run while clearing. If nothing is lost, then seven years absent is information about distance, work, and a stretch nobody in that kitchen mentions. It is not a hole in your family, and it never had the standing to become that.

There is no paying for them, and that is the good news

Here is the second thing, and it is where the actual weight sits.

Paying is what the clearing has been. Fast, unasked, every time. Always the last one at the table. It is a good and generous thing and it is also an installment plan on a debt nobody in that house has ever issued.

The trouble with an installment plan on a debt nobody issued is that it never finishes.

You have been carried through the seven years and through every year since, and the carrying was never a loan. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit who was at work in you during the years you were not here rather than starting up again when you came back.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could go wrong and will not. Nothing here will tell you what those seven years were for. Nothing here will say God used them, or that the family is stronger for it, or any of the things people say at funerals. Those sentences make a real absence into a plan, and it was not a plan.

What is true is smaller: nothing is lost, and nobody can trace out what God is doing. That will hold you.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a comforting thought and a stack of plates. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not worked off, quietly, at the end of every party. And the thing in the way is not the photograph in the hall. It is a sentence: there is no way to pay for them. Nobody has ever answered that out loud in this house, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority holding somebody's cardigan. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how hard you have been working at that table.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than regret, and there are nights when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.