Envelopes In A Drawer

The drawer sticks. It has stuck for years and he has never fixed it, and now the sticking is convenient, because a drawer that sticks is a drawer you can decide not to open.

Inside: a box of envelopes, mostly unused. A book of stamps that has gone out of date in the way stamps now do. And nine letters, written and folded and sealed, addressed in his own careful capitals, none of them posted.

Eleven years he wrote to men inside. It started because a chaplain said, at a meeting he nearly did not go to, that the thing most men in there do not get is a letter from anybody who is not asking them for something. He went home and wrote one that night. By year three he had six he wrote to regularly and a folder with dates in it so he would not miss anybody's birthday.

He is not going to describe the reply. That is his to carry and it is not for a page. It came in the second week of a February, from a man he had written to for four years, and it was not cruel, and it was not a rejection. It was simply true about something, and he read it standing up in the hallway and then sat down on the stairs and stayed there a long time.

He wrote nine more letters over the following month. Sealed all nine. Posted none of them.

That was three years ago. The drawer sticks.

The sentence is not I could not handle it. It is worse: I walked away from six men who were expecting me.

You know that sentence. It might be letters, or visits, or phone calls you used to make. There was a long faithfulness in your life, and one day something arrived that you could not carry, and you stopped, and the stopping has been the loudest thing in the house ever since.

Said to people about to walk into something unfinished

There is a sentence spoken to a whole nation at the edge of a country they had not entered, by an old man who was told plainly that he would not be going in with them. He had led them forty years. He was stopping, in the middle, not by choice.

Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the LORD thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.Deuteronomy 31:6

Read who says it and to whom. A man whose own work is ending unfinished, telling people who are about to be handed something he cannot carry any further, that the One who does not fail and does not forsake is going with them. He is not promising that he himself will not fail them. He has already failed them, in the plainest sense: he is not coming.

You are held by a God who does not fail and does not forsake, and He has not moved one inch since the second week of that February. That is what the written word says over you and not a comfort I have selected for a man with a sticking drawer, and the Holy Spirit who put the first letter in you eleven years ago is the evidence that the whole thing was never running on your capacity to absorb what came back.

Watch what that does to the accounting you do in that hallway. If the not forsaking is His, then nine sealed envelopes is information about one letter in one February that nobody should have to carry alone. It is not information about your faithfulness, and it never had the right to become that.

They were not left with nobody

Here is the second thing, and it is the part that has actually been eating you, so I will not walk around it.

Six men who were expecting me. That is a real weight and nobody here is going to call it imaginary. Somebody waited for a letter that did not come, and that matters, and being right about that is not the same as being guilty of it.

But look at the claim hiding underneath it. It says that between those six men and God stood one drawer, one book of stamps and one man in a hallway, and that when he sat down on the stairs, heaven had nothing else in that prison.

You would not say that about any other man's absence. You have never once believed it about anybody else's.

You have been carried through all three of those years, and so has every one of those six, and the carrying did not depend on the post. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in those men wherever they now are, rather than waiting at a wing gate for a letter with your handwriting on it.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a shove and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to post the nine. Nothing here is telling you to write again. If that drawer stays shut for the rest of your life you have not stepped one inch outside the work of God, because that work is a man and it does not get suspended for a stopped correspondence.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a gentle thought beside a stuck drawer. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not carried up and down a hallway for three years. And the thing in the way is not the man who wrote to you, who was telling the truth. It is a sentence: I walked away from six men. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, 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 authority standing in his own hall. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much steadiness you could summon.

If those three years have taken you somewhere darker than guilt, and there are hours 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.