The Third Envelope

It is eleven steps from the kitchen to the front door, and she has counted them, which tells you something.

The post comes about ten past nine. She knows the sound of the flap and she knows the different sound the flap makes when something stiff comes through it, and on the mornings when it is stiff she stays where she is with her hands round a mug and lets it lie there on the mat.

Sometimes for an hour. Once, memorably, until half past four.

She is not a dramatic woman. If you met her at a bus stop you would think she was one of the most level headed people you had ever spoken to. She goes to work. She rings her mother. She is the person other people bring their news to, and she is genuinely glad for them, every time, without one grain of anything sour in it.

It is only this one thing. This one particular thing that she has wanted for a long time now, and has asked God for, twice out loud and about four thousand times without words.

Twice she has let herself believe it was coming. Really believe it, the way you do when you catch yourself planning the next bit. And twice it has not, and the second time was worse than the first, not because the answer was worse but because she had allowed herself further in.

So there is a rule now, which she has never once said to anybody, and it is this: do not get your hopes up. Not about that. Not again. And the rule has worked, in the sense that it has kept the floor from going out from under her, and it has cost her something she cannot name, and the cost is why she stands in the kitchen at ten past nine holding a mug she is not drinking.

She has begun to suspect that this makes her a bad Christian.

Stop there, please. Because that last sentence is the only thing in this whole house that needs contradicting this morning.

Where hope is actually tied on

You are not faithless. You are bruised, and there is an enormous difference, and I want to be very careful that nobody blurs it here.

So hear it said over you before anything else. You are held this morning, exactly as bruised as you are, and the holding is not a reward for a steadier grip; Romans 5 was written long before either envelope, and it is the Holy Spirit, named in that very verse, who takes what is written and sets it down in a real chest in a real kitchen.

A person who cannot make themselves want something out loud any more is not somebody with a weak grip on God. They are somebody who has been dropped from a height twice and whose body has drawn a sensible conclusion about heights. That is not sin. It is not weakness. It is not a phase you are supposed to be past by now. There is a father in the Gospels who says, straight to Jesus, that he believes and needs help with his unbelief in the same breath, and Jesus does not correct him, does not lecture him, and does not send him away to sort out his position first.

So let us not argue you into hoping. Arguments do not work on a bruise, and I would not try it even if they did.

Instead I want to show you where the rope is tied, because I think you have been assuming the wrong end.

and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.Romans 5:5

Read the second half first, because that is where the whole weight is.

Hope does not put us to shame, and the reason given is not that the thing you want is coming. Look at it. It does not say hope will not shame you because your circumstances are about to change. It says hope will not shame you because the love has already been poured in, and the pouring is done, past tense, finished, sitting in you as you stand in your kitchen not drinking a cup of tea.

That is the anchor. Not the outcome. The love, already given.

This matters more than almost anything else I could tell you this morning, so let me say it as plainly as I can. What made the second time worse than the first was that you had hung your hope on the envelope. Which is a completely human thing to do, and everybody does it, and it is also the reason a hope can drop you: an envelope has no capacity to hold a person's weight. It was never built for it.

And this next part is finished rather than pending, so hear it. You have love already poured in, past tense, and the pouring is not waiting on the post. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who does the carrying of it.

But hope that is tied to a love already poured into you cannot be answered by any envelope, because the thing it is holding on to has already arrived. It arrived before the first no and it was still there the morning after the second, and it was there at half past four on the afternoon you left the post on the mat, and it is there now.

I am not going to tell you what the answer is going to be. I do not know, and anybody who says they do is trading on something they do not have. It may come and it may not. That is His, and He answers as He answers, and I am not putting a promise in your hands that I was not given to give.

Romans 5 was written long before either envelope, and it is the Holy Spirit, named in that same verse, who takes a written line and lays it down where a person is actually standing.

What I can tell you is that you are safe either way. Not consoled. Safe. Held by love that was poured in before the question was ever asked, so that the answer, whichever way it lands, is not going to be the thing that decides whether you are loved.

You can hope from inside that. It is a completely different position from the one you have been hoping in, and it is written rather than wished, and His Spirit is the one who moves a person from the one to the other.