The Rehearsal Is At Four

There is a jug of water on the counter with a slice of lemon in it that somebody put there two days ago, and the lemon has gone soft and pale, and Yusuf has been looking at it for eleven minutes.

The house is not awake. That is the only mercy available at this hour, and he is using all of it. Upstairs there are four people asleep who love him, and two of them have come a long way to be here, and there is a dress hanging on the back of a door in the room at the end of the hall.

The rehearsal is at four.

He knows the shape of the afternoon already. He has seen it in other people's houses. There will be too many chairs and not enough of them will match. His aunt will arrive first with a dish nobody asked for and everybody wants. Somebody will make him stand at the front because he is the one who is supposed to stand at the front, and there will be a moment, a small one, thirty seconds at most, where the room turns and looks at him with open faces.

And last night happened.

Not spectacularly. It never is spectacular. It was a decision made in about four seconds in a car park at nine forty with the engine off, and it was over by midnight, and the whole of it fits in a sentence so short that saying it out loud would sound like nothing.

That is what he cannot carry into the courtyard at four. Not the thing itself. The gap between the man they are going to look at and the man standing here with the lemon.

He has already run the arithmetic that everybody runs. He could be ill. There is a version of today where he is ill and everybody is disappointed in a way that costs him nothing, and he has been quietly building that version since about five o'clock.

And here I stop talking about Yusuf, because you have your own four o'clock today and you have already started building the version where you are ill.

You know exactly what this is. It is not the guilt. It is standing in a kitchen doing sums about whether you can be looked at.

The day is not the verdict

Let me put the most important thing down first, before the house wakes and there is no more quiet to say it in.

You are not disqualified from today. Not from any part of it. Not from the doorway, not from the front of the room, not from the thirty seconds when they turn and look.

And I want you to hear where that comes from, because it is not my encouragement and it would be worth very little if it were. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it across a kitchen at six in the morning:

Rejoice not against me, O my enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord is a light to me.Micah 7:8

Notice the order in that verse. The falling and the rising are in the same sentence, spoken by the same person, and the light is not switched on after the darkness has been tidied up. The Lord is a light to the one sitting in it. That is you at the counter with the soft lemon, and He is not waiting in the hall for you to be presentable.

So you are not standing outside your own family this morning. You are inside it, and you were inside it at nine forty in the car park, because the word of God says the light comes to the one sitting in the dark, and His Spirit did not step back from you between then and now.

What you are actually afraid of

Now let us be honest about the fear, because naming it takes most of its weight.

You are not afraid they will find out. You are afraid of the open faces. You are afraid of being loved on a day you have privately decided you are not worth it, which is a much stranger and heavier fear, and it is the one that has you designing an illness at six in the morning.

Hear this: you have nothing to earn back before four o'clock. Nothing. There is no debt entered anywhere and no permission being withheld, because the price for every one of your hours was already paid in full, and God does not take back what His Son paid for. That is written and settled, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes it real rather than merely true.

And say the practical half plainly with me, because a message that leaves it out has failed you. Whatever real help you have, keep all of it. The meeting, the counselor, the doctor, the medicine you take, the friend who rings on Fridays. None of it competes with what God is doing in you and none of it is a smaller faith. It is His kindness arriving with a face and a phone number, and He never asks anyone to choose between His hand and the hands He sent.