The Morning After the Robe

The bus shelter smells of wet coats and somebody's coffee, and the man in the work jacket is fourth in a line of six, which is where he always is. The woman with the tartan flask is in front of him. The lad with the headphones is behind. The number nine is late, which it is on Tuesdays, and the rain is doing the thing where it comes in sideways under the roof and gets the one shoulder that is not under the plastic.

Last night he stood at the kitchen sink with the tap running and said it. Not the speech he had been building for years, the one with the explanations in it. Just a plain sentence, the kind you say to somebody who is already in the room. And he meant it, and something in his chest gave way, and he stood there longer than the washing up needed. He went to bed feeling like a man who has come in from a long way off.

And this morning he woke up at the same time to the same alarm and made the same sandwich, and here is the same shelter, and the same driver who never nods is going to pull in with the same bus. He keeps checking himself for it, the way you pat a pocket for keys. Is it there. Is the thing from the sink still there. And he cannot find it. Not gone exactly. Just not shining. Just a Tuesday.

The woman with the flask says something about the rain and he says something back, and it is a perfectly ordinary exchange, and it is precisely as ordinary as it was last week, when he had not yet gone home to God at all. And a small cold voice, very reasonable, says: so what actually changed.

You know that shelter. You have stood in it, the morning after your own sink, your own car park, your own two in the morning, and found the day exactly the shape it always was. And the reasonable voice has said the same thing to you. I want to be honest with you before we go anywhere: I know that voice from the inside, and I know how sensible it sounds. Let me stand in the queue with you for a minute before we answer it.

The son woke up in the house

Everybody knows how the story ends. The father runs, the robe, the ring, the sandals, the calf, the music loud enough that the older brother hears it from the field. And that is where the story stops. But the son did not stop. He went to bed that night in a room he had not slept in for years, and he woke up.

I would like you to think about that morning, because nobody preaches it. The servants were clearing up. The calf was bones. The robe was on a hook, and the ring, which had fitted his hand so strangely the night before, was just a ring on a hand that had to go and do something. There were chores. There was his brother at the breakfast table, not yet over it. There was, I would guess, a fair amount of nothing at all.

And here is the thing. He was still home. The morning did not undo the road. Nothing about an ordinary Tuesday in that house made him one inch less his father's son than the running had made him the night before, and the feeling from the gate, wherever it had gone, was not the thing that made him a son. The father's word made him a son. The robe was on the hook and it was still his robe.

Now let me name the pit, because it deserves naming. The morning after is lonelier than the far country ever was, and nobody tells you that. In the far country you were at least sure of what you had lost. This morning you cannot even be sure of what you found. And into that gap steps the small reasonable voice, and it does not say you were wicked. It says you were silly. It says grown men do not cry at sinks and expect the bus to change.

You are home this morning, and the bus shelter is not the judge of it. That is not me being kind. It is written, plainly, that His mercies are new every morning, and great is His faithfulness. Not new every breakthrough. Every morning, including flat ones, including this one, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a line from an old lament true at a bus stop with rain coming in sideways.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Look who wrote that, and where. It is from Lamentations. It was written by a man sitting in a wrecked city with the smoke still in the air, and it is the least dramatic verse in the book. It does not say the walls went back up in the night. It says the mercy did. That is the shape of the morning after: not that everything shines, but that His faithfulness came round again the way the sun does, whether or not you felt it arrive.

Paul told the church at Colossae, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him. Walk. Not fly, not glow. The word for what comes after receiving is the most ordinary word there is for moving a body down a road. You have received Him, and receiving does not need to be repeated every morning to stay true. Scripture does not say as you received Him, so keep receiving Him until it feels like it did. It says walk. And the Spirit who was in the kitchen last night is the Spirit at the shelter this morning, and He did not go home to bed with the feeling.

Here is what I will not do, and I want you to see me not doing it. I will not tell you that in three weeks the bus will look different. I will not give you a timetable for the shine coming back, because I do not have one, and neither does anybody who says they do. Some people feel it for weeks. Some people feel it for an afternoon. Neither of them is more home than the other. You were welcomed before you explained anything, and you were not welcomed on the strength of how you felt. Scripture puts the robe on the son before he has finished his sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps the robe on him through the flat mornings.

And now the part I owe you about your mouth. The morning does not change by you patting your pocket for it more anxiously. Jesus said that faith no bigger than the seed you brushed off the kitchen counter last night can speak to a mountain and see it move. Speak to it. Your mountain has a shape and it is standing in this shelter with you: the small reasonable voice that says nothing changed. You have the standing to answer it, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls the ones who are His children of the house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what you say further than the sound of your voice on a wet pavement.