The Hand on Your Shoulder Is Not Angry

The paint counter at the back of the hardware store has a rack of color cards arranged like a fan, and he is holding one he has held before. Warm Oatmeal. He knows he has held it before because there is a soft crease across the corner where his thumb goes.

Saturday morning. Cart half full: two rolls of masking tape, a pack of sanding sponges, a bag of the screws he already has three hundred of at home. Behind him a boy is asking his father whether they can get the orange one, and the father is saying they will see, in the voice that means no.

The man at the counter mixes the paint and the machine begins to shake the tin, and he stands there for the whole ninety seconds and watches it, and here is what he notices while it rattles. He does not want to paint anything. He is not planning to paint anything. He has been coming in here on Saturdays because Saturday has a shape and this is the shape it has, and he could not tell you the last time anything in his week actually got through to him. Not the sermon. Not the phone call from his sister that he was glad about in the way you are glad about a form being submitted. Not the second half of his own daughter's story about her manager, which he nodded through entirely.

And then, because the machine is still going and he has nothing else to do, he thinks about God, and something in his chest tightens.

That is the part worth stopping on. Not the flatness. The tightening. Because in the half second he thought about God, he braced. He got ready to be told. Somewhere in him is a picture of a face turning toward him with an expression on it, and the expression is disappointment, and he has been quietly avoiding that face for a long stretch by staying busy in a hardware store on Saturdays.

If you have just recognized yourself, put down whatever you were reaching for to explain it. Nothing in your life is going wrong. There is no scandal, no year you went off the rails, no sin you could point to. You have simply been going through all of it without being in the room, and the strangest part is that the only thing you expect from God about it is a telling off.

Let me get in front of that, because I have some good news about the expression on His face.

The verse you are dreading ends somewhere you have not read

There is a sentence in Ephesians that gets quoted at people the way a whistle gets blown, and it was never a whistle.

Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.Ephesians 5:14

Read the third clause. Most people stop at the second one, because the first two sound like a demand and the mind fills in a tone of voice for them. But the sentence does not end on the demand. It ends on a gift. Awake, arise, and light is what is handed to you. Nobody in that sentence is being scolded and then left to generate their own dawn.

And look at who the letter is written to. Not to strangers on the way out. Paul is writing to people he has already told, in the same letter, that they are seated with Christ in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6). Everything after that is spoken to people who are already His. The awakening call in chapter five arrives inside a family, not at a border.

You are already His while you are still flat, and the sentence about waking up was written to somebody who was already seated with Christ. That is not my kindness invented for a Saturday morning; that is what stands written in Ephesians 2:6 and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a first century letter and lays it across a man holding a color card he does not need. Your standing was never on the other side of the waking. It is what the waking happens inside.

Now let me say the plain thing about the face you have been picturing.

That face is not His. I want to be careful here, because I am not going to flatter you and I am not going to tell you God has no opinions. What I am going to tell you is what He is recorded as actually doing when He comes to somebody who has gone quiet, and He does the same thing nearly every time. He feeds them. He asks a question He already knows the answer to, so that they can talk. He touches somebody. In the whole book, the tone reserved for the tired is not the tone you have been bracing for.

You have been carrying an expression on God's face that He never wore. The written word says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line like that and makes it a fact in a body rather than a nice thought about God. He is not standing over your flat years with a list. He never was.

What actually happens when the light gets handed over

Here is the mechanic, and it is worth understanding because it takes the pressure off you in a way that lasts past this article.

Light is not something a person manufactures. You cannot lie in the dark and concentrate until dawn happens. The most anyone has ever done about a sunrise is be facing the right way when it arrived. That is exactly the shape of the sentence in Ephesians: awake, arise, and He gives the light. The turning is yours. The light is His.

Which means the whole question of how much you feel this morning is off the table. You are not required to work up a warmth. You are not required to produce evidence that something is happening in you.

You are awake enough, right now, and the light in this is being given rather than generated. Ephesians 5:14 puts the giving on His side of the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a promise across two thousand years into a hardware store at half past nine. If you feel almost nothing while you read this, that changes nothing about who is doing the giving.

And there is one more thing, because you have a mouth, and that turns out to matter.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. Notice the size He named. Smaller than anything you would put on a form. It is not the quality of your attention today, and it is not the temperature of your heart. It is that a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. The switch is in your hand. The current has always been His.