The Box Still In The Boot

The queue for the recycling center goes back past the roundabout on a Saturday and everybody knows it and everybody comes anyway. Engines off, windows down, a man in a high visibility coat waving cars forward two at a time. The car in front has a mattress strapped to the roof and a small dog with strong opinions about the mattress.

She has a boot full of the right sort of rubbish. A broken clothes airer. Two bags of garden waste. A microwave that has not worked since the spring and a length of carpet that somebody promised to take and never did.

And a cardboard box with the flaps folded over each other, which has been in that boot for eighteen months.

It is toys. Duplo, mostly, and a plastic tea set with two cups missing, and a shape sorter, and a rain stick that a boy called Rueben used to march up and down the room with while his mother had the first ten minutes of adult conversation she had had all week. She bought that box out of her own cupboard and the two charity shops on the parade. She started a Tuesday night for young mums in the room above the hardware shop because she prayed about it for a month and then could not stop thinking about it, and she was as sure as she has ever been about anything that God had asked her.

Twenty came the first month. Six by the spring. Two by the summer, and then a Tuesday came where she sat with the kettle boiled and nobody arrived, and then another one, and she stopped putting it in the diary.

Her turn comes. She gets out, opens the boot, and takes out the airer and the bags and the microwave and the carpet, and closes the boot with the box still in it, and gets back in the car, exactly as she did in March and exactly as she did the March before.

If you are carrying your own version of that box, then you already know what taking it out would mean, and you know that is why it is still in there.

Read the verse again and notice where the work is

I want to be plain with you about what I am not going to say, because it has been said to you already and it did not help.

I am not going to tell you the Tuesdays will start again. I have no idea. Nobody who talks to you about this has any idea, and a person who hands you a comeback they cannot deliver is only borrowing against your hope. And I am not going to tell you what God was doing with those eighteen months, because I do not know that either, and I have watched people be comforted by a reason and then flattened later when the reason turned out to be somebody's guess.

What I can do is read the verse everybody quotes over this and show you where it actually points, because it does not point where you think.

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

There it is. In you. Not in your Tuesday night, not in your plan, not in the thing you built out of your own cupboard and two charity shops. Paul is writing from prison to people whose circumstances were coming apart, and the good work he is sure about is the one God is doing in persons.

Sit with what that takes off you, because it is a great deal. The completion of God's work is not hostage to your attendance figures. It was never resting on the room above the hardware shop staying full. What He began, He began in you, and a Tuesday with nobody in it did not reach that.

So here is what is settled about you in a queue of cars on a Saturday morning. You are a work God is completing, right now, at the same rate as before the numbers dropped. That is not my encouragement to you, it is what the word records Paul being sure of, and it is His Spirit at work in you who makes it a fact rather than a kindness.

And notice who the verb belongs to. He who began, He who brings it to completion. Both halves are His. Read it as slowly as you like and you will not find the place where the job transfers to you halfway through, because there is no such place in the sentence, and there is no such place in you either.

Now I know what that can sound like. It can sound as if the thing you did does not matter, and I am not saying that at all. It mattered. Rueben with the rain stick mattered. Ten minutes of adult conversation for a woman who had had none mattered, and the word says a cup of cold water given in His name does not go unnoticed, so nothing you carried up those stairs has been mislaid. What I am saying is narrower and better: the good work God is finishing was never the same object as the good thing you were doing, so the good thing stopping cannot stop the good work.

You have not been dropped from anything. His purpose stands, and it is not standing on your momentum, and the Holy Spirit did not pause His work in you on the Tuesday nobody came.

Then what do you do with a thing you cannot finish?

You hand it over out loud, which is the plainest thing in Scripture and the one people skip. Paul, again, from the same imprisonment, writes that he knows whom he has believed and is convinced that God is able to guard what has been entrusted to Him until that day. Entrusted. Handed across, on purpose, into keeping. That is a spoken transaction, and it is the reason God so often asks a person to say a thing out loud rather than merely to think it: a thing said has been let go of, and a thing thought is still being held.