When the Radio Went Off

The counter is finished. Two lengths of beech jointed and planed and sanded down to something you would run your hand along without thinking, and Rafi has just wiped the last of the oil into it and stood back.

It is for the fruit shop three doors along from his workshop. It will have crates of oranges on it by Saturday and nobody will ever look at the grain.

The bench is covered in shavings. There are offcuts in the crate by the door, sandpaper worn to gray, a mug that has been there since the morning. The good light is coming in low through the high window and every bit of dust in the room is visible in it.

He reaches over and turns the radio off.

He has done that at the end of every job in this room for as long as he can remember. It is a small ceremony. The noise stops, the work is done, and something in his chest usually lets go.

Tonight nothing lets go.

The room goes quiet and the quiet just sits there. The dust keeps settling. The counter is a good counter. And the thing that has filled this room hour after hour, the thing he has leaned on without ever once calling it that, has gone flat in his hands like a fizz that has been left open, and he stands there in the low light with his palm still on the switch.

You are the one with your hand on the switch, in the exact hour the thing that always worked stopped working.

The hour is not an accusation

First, before anything: this hour is not God taking something away from you to teach you a lesson. Put that down. It is not a punishment, it is not a stripping, and there is no verdict being handed to you in the silence of that workshop.

What has happened is much simpler and much kinder. A thing that was never built to hold a person has finally, honestly, shown you what it can hold. That is not a loss. That is a piece of accurate information arriving at the one hour when it could actually be received.

And I am not going to ask you what the thing is. It genuinely does not matter for anything I am about to say. It could be a radio, a job, a screen, a routine, a person, a plan, a silence you have grown used to. Whatever it is, it filled the hours, and tonight it did nothing, and that is all this article needs to know.

You are standing in an open door, not in the wreckage of something, and nothing about this hour is being held against you. Isaiah 55 has been holding this invitation open the whole time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranged for you to be reading a page about it in the same evening the emptiness arrived.

Labor for that which satisfieth not

The prophet is shouting in a marketplace. That is the setting of Isaiah 55, and once you see it you cannot unsee it: a voice in among the stalls, calling out over the noise like a trader with something better than what is on the tables.

Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.Isaiah 55:2

Read the diagnosis carefully, because it is astonishingly gentle. He does not say wicked. He does not say faithless. He says that which satisfieth not. He is not standing there condemning the buyer. He is telling them the truth about the goods.

And the verse before it settles the other thing, the thing a person in your position always braces for. Come, He says, everyone who thirsts. He that hath no money, come. Buy without money and without price. There is no toll on this. There is nothing to bring, nothing to pay, no way for a man to arrive too empty for the table, because empty handed is the condition He names in the invitation itself.

You have an open invitation with no price attached to it, and the emptiness in your hands is not a disqualification, it is the entry. Isaiah 55 says come and buy without money, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that call sounding in a workshop where the radio has just gone off.

He never wanted your hunger to be smaller. He wanted it aimed at bread.

You do not have to go anywhere to turn

Here is the part that makes tonight possible rather than theoretical.

Turning is not travel. It is not a journey begun tonight and completed in some better season, once a life has been tidied into a more respectable condition. Turning is a change of facing, and a man can do it standing exactly where he is, in a room full of shavings, with sawdust on his forearms and the oil rag still in his hand.

For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.Psalm 107:9

Look at who gets filled in that sentence. The longing soul. The hungry one. Not the recovered one, not the tidy one, not the one who has already sorted out what went wrong. The hungry soul is filled precisely as a hungry soul, and it is God doing the filling.

Which means the hour when the thing went flat is not the worst hour to come to Him. It is the best one. You are the exact person that verse is describing, at the exact moment it describes them.

You are able to turn tonight, in this room, with nothing in your hands, and the turning takes one movement and no distance at all. Psalm 107 says He fills the hungry with goodness, and the Holy Spirit is already in the room where you are standing, closer than the switch under your palm.