I Was Not There When It Counted

It rained the whole of that Tuesday.

The kind that does not fall so much as hang, so that everything you owned smelled faintly of wet coat by the evening, and the gutter above the back door made the noise it makes when the leaves are in it.

She remembers the rain better than she remembers anything else about that night, and she has often wondered why. She thinks it is because the rain is the only part of it she is allowed to think about without something opening up in her chest.

The phone went at ten past eleven. She saw the name. She let it ring.

It went again at twenty past. She let that one ring too, and turned it face down on the arm of the chair, and told herself the thing you tell yourself, which is that she would ring back first thing, that it was late, that she had work in the morning, that she did not have anything left in her that night, and every single one of those was true.

The third call was at seven minutes past midnight.

By morning it had become a slightly awkward thing rather than an urgent one, and by the weekend it had become a hard thing to bring up, and by the following month it had become a wall, and by now it has been rather a long time and there is a silence between them where a friendship used to be.

She found out afterwards what that night had been. She is not going to tell you what it was and I am not going to make her.

What she will tell you is that she has gone by a new name since. Nobody gave it to her out loud. She gave it to herself, somewhere around the third week, and she has answered to it ever since: the one who was not there.

You know the shape of this, or you would not still be here. Perhaps it was a phone. Perhaps it was a hospital corridor you did not walk down, or a funeral you did not go to, or a room you were in the whole time and said nothing useful in. There is a night with your name on it, and you have been carrying it privately for a long time, and you would rather nobody knew.

The second fire

There is a man in the Gospels who did the worst version of what you did, in public, to the one person he had sworn to and in the hour that person needed him most.

He had promised, loudly, in front of everybody, that he would go to prison and to death first. Then he stood in a courtyard warming his hands at a charcoal fire and said, three times, that he did not know the man at all. The third one he swore to. Then a bird called, and his friend was led past and looked straight at him, and he went outside and cried like something in him had broken, because something had.

Now hold on to that fire, because there is a second one coming and the details are not accidental.

Some weeks later the man has gone back to fishing, which is what people do when they cannot face what they have become. He has been out all night and caught nothing. And at first light there is somebody standing on the shore, and there is a charcoal fire burning on the sand, the same kind of fire he denied at, and there is bread and there is fish already cooking on it.

Watch the order of things, because this is the whole message.

He is not questioned first. He is fed first. Breakfast comes before the conversation, and the man who denied Him gets handed a plate.

Only afterwards, when everyone has eaten, does the Lord ask him anything, and He asks the same question three times, once for each denial, quietly, at the water's edge.

He said to him a third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" and he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep."John 21:17

Look at what the man says when he has nothing left to argue with. Lord, You know everything. He has stopped defending himself. He has stopped explaining the courtyard and the cold and the fear. He simply hands the whole business over to Someone who already has all of it.

And look at what the Lord does with him next. He does not put him on probation. He does not say we will see how you go. He gives him the sheep. He hands the failure the work, in the same breath, on the same beach, with the fish still on the fire.

That is what restoration actually looks like, and it is nothing like what shame told you it would look like.

Shame told you that you now have a permanent name, and that the name is the one you gave yourself in the third week. Shame told you that you would have to earn your way back over years, and that any good thing you do from now on is you paying something off. Shame told you that if the person you failed ever knew how you really feel about it, that would somehow settle the account.

None of that is in this chapter. There is no account. There is a fire, and a breakfast, and a question asked gently three times, and a man being trusted again before he has done one single thing to deserve it.

And hear this, because it is ours to say and not yours to prove. We carry this. It is our job to put you in front of what God has actually said, and it was never your job to work up enough remorse to qualify. You did not fail because your faith was small. You were a tired, frightened human being on a wet Tuesday, and the God who made you knows exactly what you are made of, and has never once been shocked by it.

Now, what belongs to you, and it is more than you have been using.

You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the authority to speak into your own house has been handed to you. Shame is not a fact about you. It is a voice, and it has been given the run of the place, and you have every right to put it out in a Name that outranks it.

One honest word about the friend. If a door is open, and a plain apology would be a kindness to them rather than a relief to you, that is a good thing and God will help you do it. But you are not required to confess this to any person in order to receive what is on the table this morning. Some doors are closed. Some people have moved, or moved on, or died. Not one of those closes this beach, because your restoration was never in their hands, and it is not being held back by anyone.