The Key Is Not In Their Hand

The bag of hymn books weighs about as much as a small dog and she has carried it four hundred yards.

There are five of them standing there. Doreen has brought a flask. Somebody's grandson has come to do the chairs and is now standing about with his hands in his pockets looking at his phone, which is the most reasonable thing anybody is doing.

The door is locked. Third time.

The key situation is not a scandal. That is what makes it so tiring. There are two keys. One is with a man who is a good man and who works away now and did not know anybody still used the hall on a Wednesday. The other is with the treasurer, who has been unwell, and whose daughter has understandably not made a spare key her first priority.

Everybody in this is decent. Everybody is doing their best. And they have been standing outside a locked hall three Wednesdays out of four.

She is seventy-eight. She has been organizing something in this village since before most of these people were born, and she has never once made a fuss, and there is a specific tiredness that belongs to the person who does not make a fuss.

The sentence arrives while she is putting the bag down on the step. Not somebody should sort this out. It is: nobody has the key, and I am too old to be the one who chases it.

You know that step. It might be a hall, or a login, or a permission, or a piece of paperwork sitting with somebody who is not answering. Nobody is being difficult. Everybody means well. And the thing you were going to do sits behind a door that nobody in the group can open.

Whose shoulder the key is on

There is a strange verse in Isaiah about a change of stewards in a palace, and Jesus later takes the exact wording of it and applies it to Himself, which is the only reason it matters on a step with a bag of hymn books.

And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder; so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open.Isaiah 22:22

Notice where the key is. Not in a pocket. Not in a drawer at a treasurer's house. On a shoulder, which is how a steward's key was carried in that world, in the open, visibly, so anybody could see who held authority in that house.

And notice the pairing. He opens and nobody shuts. He shuts and nobody opens. The authority runs one direction only.

You are standing outside a locked hall belonging to a house whose key hangs on the shoulder of Christ. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a woman on a step, and the Holy Spirit who has been with you through fifty years of organizing in this village is the evidence that what happens here has never been decided by who has a spare cut.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic on the step. If the key of the house is on His shoulder, then a locked hall is information about a man working away and a treasurer who is unwell. It is not the keeper of what happens here, and it never had the standing to become that.

Nobody in this is a villain, and nobody here will make one

Here is the second thing, and at seventy-eight it matters more than the door does.

There is a version of the next six months where the man who works away becomes the problem, and the treasurer's daughter becomes the problem, and a village that has held together for a long time develops a small permanent crack that everybody can feel and nobody names.

That has happened twice in this place, and the start of it is always the same. It starts on a step with five people and a flask and somebody saying, quite mildly, that it is not good enough.

This page is not going to help that along.

You have been carried through all three of those Wednesdays, and the carrying was never in anybody's key ring. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in this village rather than waiting on a locksmith.

And nothing here will tell you a spare key turns up, or that next Wednesday is different. Nobody knows. What is here is that no door in this village is the final authority over what God is doing in it.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a cold step. 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. Out loud. Not carried politely for three weeks. And the thing in the way is not the man who works away. It is a sentence: I am too old to be the one who chases it. Which may well be true, and which nobody has ever answered 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 woman with any authority sitting on a step with a bag of books. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how long you have been doing this.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than tiredness, and there are days 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.