Two Things And A Table

Twenty to ten on a Tuesday night, shutter down, and the back room smells of cardboard and cardamom.

Tarek has had the shop on this corner for twenty six years. The back room has a Formica table with a burn mark on the corner, sacks of rice standing against the wall, boxes of dates stacked to the height of his shoulder, and a strip light that flickers twice before it commits to coming on.

He does the count on a Tuesday. Tins, then dry goods, then the freezer, then the till.

But at four o'clock this afternoon Junayd, who is seventeen and works Saturdays and Tuesday evenings and stacks tins with his headphones in, took one earphone out and said, "Amu. Do you still believe all of it?"

Not rude. Genuinely asking. And then gone down the aisle with the empty box before Tarek had properly turned around.

All of it.

That is the phrase that stuck. All of it. It has been going around the back of his head through the tins, the dry goods, the freezer and the till.

So at twenty to ten, with the count finished and the money bagged, Tarek turns the stock pad over to the blank side, and sits there with the pen.

His father had a test for a thing, and it was not a complicated one. Would you put your hand flat on the table for it. Not, do you think it is probably right. Not, would you defend it if somebody pushed you at a wedding. Would you lay your hand down flat, in front of everybody in the room, and leave it there.

He writes one.

He waits a while, and writes two.

And then he sits in a back room at twenty to ten at night, sixty one years old, with the strip light ticking over his head, and nothing else comes.

Not because his head is empty. His head is full. There are things on those shelves he thinks are probably true. Things he was taught at nine and has never once checked. Things he would happily argue about over food at a wedding until somebody took the plates away. None of them are hand on the table things. Not tonight. Not honestly.

Two.

He tears the page off along the perforation, folds it in half and then in half again, and puts it in his shirt pocket behind the pen.

And walking out to the car he cannot shake the feeling that he is carrying a receipt for something that has been taken out of the shop.

Two things. Sixty one years old. Twenty six years on this corner.

Two.

The test your father gave you was a good test

Before anything else, I am not going to write on your page.

I could. It would take me four minutes and it would look generous. And then you would be carrying a list that came out of a stranger's head instead of a list that came out of your own chest at twenty to ten at night with the strip light ticking, and the second one is worth more than the first by an amount I cannot measure. So the page stays yours. Two lines, in your handwriting, and I am not adding a third.

Nor will I tell you that short is better. That would just be another man writing on your page from the other direction.

What I will do is tell you what your father's test actually was, because he handed you something sharper than he knew. Would you put your hand flat on the table for it. That is not a test of how much you know. It is a test of what is carrying weight. A house has plenty of walls, and a small number of them are holding the roof up, and no builder who has ever lived called the load bearing ones a disappointing quantity.

You have been reading your own page as a receipt. It is an inventory of what is standing.

And now hear this, because it is the thing that came before your list and does not depend on it: you are His, and that was settled before you ever picked the pen up. What is written says the foundation of God stands sure, sealed with this, that the Lord knows those who are His, and the Holy Spirit who put that sentence into Scripture is the same Spirit sitting with you in a back room over a folded page.

Now look at what Paul does when he is asked to hand the thing over. He is not short of material. This is the man who wrote Romans, who could go eleven chapters without drawing breath. And when he sets down what he calls of first importance, what he actually received and passed on, it comes to a handful of clauses.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.1 Corinthians 15:3-4

Count them. Sit in that for a second at your Formica table.

That is not Paul being brief because his readers were slow. That is what of first importance looks like when it is written down: a death, a burial, a rising, and twice over the phrase according to the Scriptures, because he is not inventing it, he is handing on something he was handed. The length was never the point. What it bears is the point.

So here is what you have got, and take it in your hands as something already true. You have a page in your shirt pocket with what holds you up written on it, and Scripture measures the ground under a man rather than the number of items on his shelf, and it is His Spirit and not your inventory who bears witness that you belong to Him.

And I want to answer the fear directly, because it followed you out to the car. Two is not a faith, you said to yourself. But a faith was never a quantity of items. It is a Person held on to, and the lines on your page are the places where your hands are actually gripping. A man holding on with both hands and one page is not a reduced man. He is a man with nothing decorative left, which is a different thing, and it is the condition Paul was writing to people from a prison in.

You are held right now, tonight, with two lines and no third, and the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is keeping you, which is what is promised in Romans 8:11 and which does not consult your list before it holds.