It Was Supposed to Be Enough by Now

The first Tuesday of February, twenty past seven in the morning, and he is at the kitchen table with a pencil because a pencil can be rubbed out.

He does it on the back of the electricity envelope, in a column, the way he has done sums since he was fifteen. He is good at it. Forty one years on the railway and then the depot, and he could always tell you to the penny what a job cost before the paperwork came round.

The column comes to the same answer it came to in January. It is short. Not dramatically. Not the kind of short that makes a story. Just short in the way that means the heating goes on at four instead of two, and the good coat gets another winter, and he tells his daughter he has already eaten.

He does the sum twice. Then he sits with the pencil in his hand and looks out at the yard, where the frost is still on the shed roof, and what goes through him is not panic.

It is something much quieter and much worse.

He was told. Somebody sat him down in 1987 in a room with a brown carpet and told him what this would come to, and he believed it, and he built forty one years on the strength of it, and he never once missed a contribution. And the arithmetic on the back of this envelope says that the man in the brown carpeted room was wrong, and nobody is coming to explain it, and there is no next promotion to fix it with because there is no next anything.

And underneath even that, there is the thing he would never say out loud in the church porch. He is ashamed. A man of seventy one, who worked every day he was offered, sitting in his own kitchen doing sums on an envelope and feeling like he has been caught at something.

Now I am going to stop, because I do not think that is a man on a railway pension. I think that is you, and I think the figure at the bottom of your own column came into your head about four lines ago, and you know it to the penny.

The shame in this is not yours, and I want it off you first

I am going to be very plain with you, because this is the subject where people get lied to most, and usually by people smiling.

Nobody is going to tell you here that a shortfall is a test of your faith. Nobody is going to hint that money would move if you gave differently, believed harder or said a better prayer. That is not the gospel, it has never been the gospel, and it has done real damage in rooms full of people your age who deserved better. God does not run a scheme, and your need is not a lever anybody gets to pull on Him or on you.

So let me take the shame off first, because it is the heaviest item on the table and it is not even yours.

You did the thing you were told to do. You did it for forty one years, in weather, with your back going, and you did not miss. The gap is not a report on your character. It is not a report on your prudence. It is not evidence that you were foolish, and it is certainly not evidence that God has stopped paying attention to you. Numbers moved that nobody consulted you about. That is all that happened, and being on the wrong end of it is not a moral condition. His Spirit is not standing over that envelope with a red pen, and there is no line written anywhere in Scripture that turns a shortfall into a verdict on a man.

And then there is the second weight, which is the one that actually keeps a person awake. Not the money. The being past usefulness. The feeling that the world has finished with you, and that you are now a person things get worked out around rather than with.

Hear what an old man prayed about exactly that, thousands of years before your envelope.

Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth.Psalm 71:9

That is not a polite prayer. That is a man saying the fear straight out, in the temple, in front of everybody. He is afraid of being put down like a tool that has stopped working. He does not dress it up and God does not rebuke him for it.

And the whole psalm around that line is a man going back through his own history and finding God at every stage of it. Held from before he was born. Taught from his youth. And now, with his strength going, he is not making a new case. He is pointing at a track record.

That is what you are standing on this morning. Not a formula. A history. The same God who was there in 1987 in the brown carpeted room, and on every early shift, and at your kitchen table this February, and He is not evaluating your usefulness, because He never was. Psalm 71 is a written record and not a mood, and under His Spirit your own forty one years read the same way: track laid down, rather than time gone by.