Everything On The List Was True

The water is cold enough that the two men standing in it have given up pretending otherwise, and one of them keeps laughing about it, which is not helping anybody.

Twenty odd people on the bank on a bright March morning, in coats, in wellingtons where anyone owns a pair. Somebody has brought a flask of tea and somebody else has brought far too many rolls. There is a dog on a lead who has decided the whole event is for him. Sarah's granddaughter goes in first, and she has been talking about this for a fortnight, and now she is at the edge of the water with her arms folded across her chest and her face doing something complicated.

You are holding the towels. You have been the one who holds the towels for nine years, because you are always early and you have a car and somebody has to.

She goes under. She comes up. The whole bank makes the noise a bank makes, and Sarah is crying, and the dog barks at nothing, and one of the men in the water says something nobody catches and everybody laughs at anyway.

And you clap. You clap in the right place and you mean it, in the way you mean things now. Underneath the clapping there is a flat calm where something used to be, and it has been that way so long that you no longer even check.

Nobody knows. Not because you hide it especially well, but because everything about you is exactly as it always was. Same seat. Same rota. Same lift given to the same two people every week. The books are in order and the ledger balances and there is nothing whatever to report. Something went out, and you did not go anywhere.

The most accurate reader there has ever been

I want to take you into a letter dictated to a church, and I want us to read the order of it rather than the summary of it, because the order is where the comfort actually lives.

Jesus speaks to the believers at Ephesus, and He opens with a list. He knows their works. He knows their labor and their patient endurance. He knows they cannot bear with people who do evil. He knows they tested men who called themselves apostles and found them out. He knows they have borne up for His name's sake and have not grown weary. Six separate commendations, none of them faint, and not one of them withdrawn later in the paragraph.

Then this.

But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first.Revelation 2:4

Look at what has just happened, because it is not what a cold person expects. He did not say they had gone. He did not say they had stopped believing, or stopped turning up, or stopped working, and He was in a perfect position to say any of those and He said none of them, because none of them were true. He named the one thing that had actually gone, and He named it love. You are being read by the most accurate reader there has ever been, and He has not mistaken your flatness for anything else. That is not my reassurance dressed up; it is the written word showing you His own diagnosis in His own hand, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings a written sentence home to a particular person on a particular March morning.

This matters more than any amount of comfort, and here is why. Somebody in your position spends real energy on a self diagnosis, and the diagnosis goes wrong in the same direction every time. The coldness must mean drift. Or something unconfessed. Or that none of it was ever real and the years were a long, respectable habit. Those are the three verdicts a quiet person hands himself before it gets light, and Jesus, looking straight at people whose situation was yours, reached for none of the three.

He asked for the one thing He actually wanted

There is a second thing in the order, and it is gentler than the first.

Think what it costs anybody to say I miss you. It is a sentence that admits an attachment, and nobody says it about a thing they never wanted. When Jesus says the love has gone cool, He is not filing a complaint about output. He is saying what He came for. He did not want an efficient congregation at Ephesus. He wanted them. The works were what love had been doing while it was warm, and He can tell the difference between the two the way you can tell a house with somebody in it from a house with the lights on a timer.

You are wanted, personally, at exactly this temperature, by the one who noticed the change before you would admit it to yourself. Scripture does not have Him asking for a performance to be restored; it has Him asking for the love, and the love of God is poured into a heart through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:5), which makes warmth a supply rather than a product.

And notice what He does not do, because it is as loud as what He does. He does not tell them they never meant it. He does not tell them to feel something by Thursday. He does not hold up the version of them from ten years earlier and ask why they are not that person any more. The cold is named accurately, and then it is met, and there is not one word of contempt anywhere in the sentence.

You have not been quietly downgraded, and a flat morning has changed nothing about what He calls you. That is the written word's own arrangement of the facts, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a supply running through a person who cannot feel the tap.