Nobody At Work Could Tell

Quarter past six on the Monday, and the yard was the same yard.

Same puddle by the gate that never dries even in August. Same three vans nose in. Same Kev leaning on the back of his with a flask lid of coffee, saying the same thing he says every Monday, which is that he is going to jack it in, which he has been going to do since 2014.

And nobody could tell.

That is the entire content of what happened, and it is why he has never told anybody about it, because there is nothing to tell. He got out of his car and walked across the yard and Kev said what Kev says and somebody asked him about the football and he said what he thought about the football, and at twenty past six they started, and it was a Monday.

He had gone into the water twenty hours earlier.

He is not going to pretend he had expected a marching band. He is a fitter, forty-three, and not a dramatic man. But there had been a thing in him on the Sunday night, sitting in his own front room, that he can only describe as an expectation, and the expectation had a shape, and the shape was: something will be different tomorrow and somebody will notice.

Nobody noticed. Because there was nothing to notice.

And here is what happened in him, at about half past nine that Monday morning, kneeling on a concrete floor with a spanner in his hand. He thought, quite calmly, well, it did not take, did it.

Then somebody shouted something and he got up and got on with it.

That was eleven years ago. He has never revisited it. He goes on a Sunday. He is on the schedule for the parking lot. He would say, if you asked him straight, that he is a Christian, and he would mean it.

But there is a floor in him where an expectation collapsed on a Monday morning, and he has been walking around on it since, and every year the floor gets a bit more settled and a bit more like just how the house is.

What was actually put on you

Let me tell you what happened on that Sunday, in the language Scripture uses, because I do not think anybody has ever put it to you in these terms and I think the terms matter.

You were sealed.

That is the word, and it is a specific one. Not encouraged. Not welcomed. Sealed.

In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise.Ephesians 1:13

A seal in that world was wax and a signet, and it did three jobs. It said whose the thing was. It said the thing had not been opened by anybody else. And it said the thing was going where the sender intended it to go.

And every one of those three jobs is performed on the outside of the parcel by somebody else entirely, and none of them are detectable by the parcel.

You are sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, and that is not a comfort I am offering a man with a spanner, it is the written word, and the Spirit who is the seal is Himself the reason it is landing on the floor in you rather than on your general assent.

Now let me say something about the expectation, because I do not want to be sniffy about it.

You expected somebody to notice. That was not vanity and it was not immaturity. It was the entirely reasonable instinct of a man who had just had the biggest thing in his life happen, wanting the world to acknowledge it in some way, and there is not a person alive who has not wanted that about something.

And nobody noticed, because a seal is invisible, and because Kev was going to say what Kev says about jacking it in whether or not the man walking across that yard had been sealed by God twenty hours earlier.

You were not given nothing on that Sunday. You were given the one thing that a yard at quarter past six was never going to be able to report on. Scripture says it plainly and the Spirit is both the gift and the guarantee, and eleven years of nobody mentioning it is exactly what being sealed looks like from the inside.

I want to say something about the floor, too.

You have been walking around on a collapsed expectation for eleven years, and because you are not a dramatic man you never made anything of it, and because you never made anything of it nobody ever helped you with it, and it has quietly become the shape of the room.

You have been a sealed man on a schedule for a parking lot for eleven years, and the word says the sealing happened after you believed and stays where God put it, and the Spirit has been the deposit in you through every one of those Mondays, including the one where you decided it had not taken.

And here is the last of it, and it is for a man on a concrete floor at half past nine.

You are not a man something failed to happen to. You are a man something happened to in a register that a yard cannot read. Kev cannot see a seal. The football cannot see a seal. It was not put on you so that somebody at the depot could tell. Ephesians 1:13 says you were sealed after you believed, and the Holy Spirit is Himself both the seal and the proof that the sealing took.