The Fare You Do Not Have

Twenty to six in the morning, and the only light at the shelter is the one over the timetable, which flickers, which it has done for two years.

He is not waiting for a bus. That is the part that would look odd to anyone driving past. He has walked twenty five minutes in the dark to stand under a plastic roof and read a timetable he has already read on his phone eleven times, because he is hoping that this time, in front of him, in real print, there will be an earlier service he has somehow missed. A cheaper one. Something before the peak.

There is not. There has never been.

He takes his hand out of the pocket of the coat, which is his brother-in-law's coat, good and heavy and slightly too long in the arm, and he counts what is in his palm again, in the flickering light, at twenty to six in the morning, like a man doing a sum that might come out differently on the fourth attempt.

Six pounds forty two.

The return is eighteen sixty. The interview is at twenty to eleven on Thursday, in a town forty miles up the road, for a job he can actually do, for the first company in fourteen months to write back to him like a person rather than an automated system. He read that letter out to his wife twice. He has it folded in the inside pocket, against his chest, where you keep something you do not want to crease.

And there is Thursday to get through, and the electricity, and his daughter needs shoes.

Here is what is actually breaking him, and he could not explain it to anybody, so he does not try. It is not that the number is big. It is that the number is small. If a mountain were in the way he could at least be dignified about a mountain. He is being stopped by eighteen pounds sixty, and there is a particular kind of shame in that, the shame of a small number, and it makes a grown man feel like he is being laughed at by something.

He stands there. The light flickers. Somewhere behind the houses the sky begins going the color of dishwater and a milk van goes by.

He does not pray. He would not be able to say why not.

And now I am going to stop calling him he.

Because you know the exact figure. You know it to the penny, and you know the exact hour of the night when you did the sum again, and you know that you have not told the one or two people who would help, because there is no sentence for it that does not feel like standing in a doorway with your hands out.

Come and stand under here with me. It is not raining yet. I want to show you something about your problem that I do not think you have seen.

Your problem has a shape, and the shape is a road

First, the honest part, because you have had enough of people arriving cheerful at your situation.

Fourteen months is a long time. It has taken things off you that nobody sees on a form. It has taken the way you used to walk into a room. It has taken the ordinary pleasure of saying yes to a coffee. You have become an expert in a whole set of skills you never wanted, the arithmetic of a Thursday, the geography of which shop marks down at which hour, the art of sounding fine on the phone to your mother. None of that has gone unnoticed. His Spirit has been out at that shelter through every one of the fourteen months, and the word has a name for a man on a long road with not much in his bag: it calls him kept.

And now the door that finally opened has a bus fare standing in front of it, and it is the smallness of it that is humiliating. I know. I am not going to talk you out of feeling that, and I am certainly not going to suggest that the number in your palm this morning says anything at all about your worth, your diligence or your faith. It does not. Nowhere in the whole of Scripture is a person ever shamed for the size of what is in their hand. Not once.

Now let me show you where the verse I want to give you comes from, because it changes everything about how it lands.

Psalm 121 is a traveling song. It belongs to a set of psalms that were sung on the road, out loud, by people walking up to Jerusalem for the feasts. Not by people at home who were comfortable. By people on a journey, most of them poor, most of them on foot, most of them worried about exactly the things you would be worried about on a long road with children and not much in the bag.

And this is what they sang.

The LORD will guard your going out and your coming in, from now and to the age.Psalm 121:8

Look at what God attaches Himself to in that line. Not a balance. Not a total. A going out and a coming in. He does not say, I will make the road cheap. He says, I am the guard on it, both directions, both ends, starting now and not stopping.

Which tells you what kind of problem you actually have. You have been holding this as a money problem, and it is a journey problem, and God speaks the language of journeys fluently. He has been getting people to places they could not afford to reach for the whole of human history, and He very rarely does it the way anyone expects, and He almost never does it a week early.

And a few lines above that, the same song says this about Him. He will not let your foot slip. Your keeper does not doze off. He does not sleep. Read that with the hour you actually keep. Three in the morning, ceiling, sums. He is not asleep at three. He is not asleep at twenty to six under a flickering light while a man counts coins into his own palm for the fourth time. He was there for the first three counts as well. That is Psalm 121 and not a kind thought, and His Spirit is why it reads as a sentence about your road rather than somebody's pilgrimage in another century.

Now, I want to be very careful with you, because you have been handled carelessly by people who talk about God and money in the same breath, and I am not going to do that to you.

I am not telling you that eighteen pounds sixty is going to appear because you read this. I do not know that and it is not mine to promise, and if I dressed a hope up as a guarantee I would be handing you something God never said. Nothing you do buys anything from Him. Nothing you give moves Him. He is not running a scheme and there is no transaction in this room, and any voice that has ever told you otherwise was not speaking for Him.

What I am telling you is who is on that road. Provision in Scripture almost never looks like a sudden increase. It looks like bread for today, exactly enough, arriving in the morning, from a direction nobody was watching. Met need. Not a windfall. Enough to make the journey. And the Spirit has never once been late to a morning like that.

And one more practical thing, because love without practicality is just a nice feeling. Say the sentence out loud to a human being. Ring the company and ask, plainly, whether they can see you by video or whether they cover travel, because that is a normal question that normal people ask and it costs you nothing but the asking. Tell the man whose coat you are wearing. You have been carrying this alone for fourteen months and the carrying alone is doing more damage than the number ever did.