The Sixth Glass

Bilal puts out six glasses for five people and has done for four years.

Nobody has ever said anything about it. Nadia sets the bread and the olives, and Bilal brings the tray out with the tea, and there are six, and there have been six since the September that Karim stopped answering.

Karim is not dead. That is not this story. He is somewhere, and there were words, and there was a matter of a business and a matter of a marriage and one sentence said in a stairwell that Bilal would give the rest of his life to have back. He has an address in another country that may or may not still be current. He sends nothing.

So there are six glasses.

And nobody in that house discusses it, in the way that families have things they do not discuss, which is not coldness so much as a shared understanding that some subjects have a temperature nobody can hold.

A neighbor's boy came over in the spring, eleven years old, sent round with a dish, and he stayed for tea because that is what happens, and he looked at the tray and counted, and said what an eleven year old says.

"Who is that one for?"

And the table went still for about a second and a half.

And Bilal said, "For whoever comes."

The boy said "Oh," and took a pastry, and the evening carried on.

Now here is the thing Bilal has never said to anybody, and it is the reason I am telling you about the glasses.

He has been doing the same thing with God.

He prays. Every day, without fail, at the times, and he has not missed once in four years. He reads. He goes. He gives what he gives and he does what he does and if you asked anybody in that street they would tell you Bilal is a man of God and they would be right.

And there is nothing in it.

He would not call it doubt. That would be too strong and too interesting. It is more that somewhere in the four years, the whole of it turned into arithmetic. He does the sum. The sum comes out. And a warmth that used to be there, that he never once thought about because it was simply there, has not been in the room for a very long time.

Six glasses for five people.

The one sentence that says both things at once

There is a verse in Isaiah that ought to be strange to everybody who reads it and mostly gets read past.

Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, Savior!Isaiah 45:15

Read the two halves in one breath, because Isaiah put them in one breath deliberately.

A God who hides Himself. That is not an accusation and it is not a complaint. It is a description, offered as a fact about His character, by a man who is not in any trouble at the time.

And then, without a pause, without a but, without any softening: Savior.

Both. In the same sentence. Not hidden and therefore absent. Not absent and therefore not saving. Hidden, and saving, at once, and Isaiah does not appear to find this a contradiction that needs explaining.

So hear this said over you, in the courtyard with the tray going cold. You are not outside His care because you cannot feel Him, and the four years of arithmetic have not moved you one inch further away. That is written in the plainest terms Isaiah has, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who is described as bearing witness with our spirit, which is a work that goes on underneath the level at which a person can take their own temperature.

Now let me say the thing that is not being said to you elsewhere, and I want to say it carefully.

I do not know why it has been like this.

Not a clue. And I am not going to pretend otherwise, because the moment somebody tells you why, they have made themselves a spokesman for a thing they were not shown, and this article will not do that to you.

Nothing here says God sent this. Nothing here says there is a lesson in it that you are failing to extract, and nothing here suggests you would have felt something by now if you had done any of it differently. Those sentences have been handed to hurting people for centuries and they are not in Isaiah and they are not in this message.

What is here is smaller and it is load bearing: hidden is not gone.

And there is a place where God did the most decisive thing He has ever done, and He did it at the exact point where He looked least like Himself. A cross, in the dark, with a man crying out and no answer coming and every visible fact saying that God had left the field entirely.

He had not. That is the whole of the Christian faith and it hangs on that one point.

Which means the visible is not the verdict. It was not the verdict on that Friday and it is not the verdict on your Tuesday. That is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds a person through a long stretch where nothing is felt, and He does that whether or not the person can tell He is doing it.

Let me say one more thing about the four years of arithmetic, because you have been quietly ashamed of it.

You kept going.

Four years of praying with nothing coming back, and you did not stop. That is not a cold man going through motions. In Scripture that has a name, and the name is faithfulness, and it is worth considerably more than a warm week.

You have been putting out a sixth glass for four years. Whatever else that is, it is not unbelief.

There was a man five hundred years ago who taught that God is most present where He appears most absent, and who called this the theology of the cross, and who said that anybody who wants to find God should stop looking in the places where He would obviously be and go and look at the place where nothing about Him is visible at all. He did not say it to be clever. He said it because he had spent years in exactly your courtyard.