Sealed While You Were Looking the Other Way

It takes ninety seconds. She turns to look at the bucket of stocks outside the flower stall, because her mother used to buy them, because they were on the coffin in April and now she cannot walk past a bucket of them without stopping.

When she turns back he is not there.

The market is full. Saturday full. The fish van has a line, somebody is shouting about strawberries, a pushchair goes over her foot and the woman apologizes twice. And in the space of about two breaths her entire body has arrived at a conclusion, and the conclusion is not he has gone to look at the batteries. Her chest knows exactly what has happened. She is fifty-two years old and she is nine again, coming in from school to a house with the back door open and nobody in it, standing in a kitchen calling out and getting nothing back.

Ninety seconds. Then he comes round the end of the fruit stall holding two bags and saying something about the price of grapes, and she laughs, and she says nothing at all, because how do you say it.

You know that ninety seconds. Maybe it arrives in a supermarket, or when the house is quieter than it should be, or when a phone rings out twice. And underneath it there is a sentence you have carried since you were small and have never said out loud to anybody, which is that when it happens, you will be the one still standing in the kitchen.

The pit, and we are not hurrying past it

Two things are in that market and I want both of them named before anything lifts, because one of them is a grief and the other is a fear, and they are not the same and they should not be treated as though they were.

The grief is real and it is recent. You buried her in April. The stocks are not a symbol, they are the actual flowers that were on the actual coffin, and there is no verse in the Bible that makes a bucket of them outside a flower stall easy to walk past. Nobody here is going to tell you that hope means you should be further along. Paul wrote the passage this whole thing is named from to people who were in bits about their dead, and he did not tell them to stop crying. He told them not to grieve as those who have no hope, which is a sentence about the second half and not about the first. Grieve. Fully. The hope does not shorten it by one day.

The fear is a different animal and it is older. It came into you at nine years old in an empty kitchen, or wherever yours came from, and it has been quietly doing sums about you ever since.

You are not being judged by the state of your nerves, and the fear you have carried since you were small is not evidence about you. Scripture never once makes anxiety a measurement of anybody's standing, and the Holy Spirit is not reading your Saturday morning as a report card. He is the comfort in it.

The keeping was never yours to do

Now here is the thing that actually answers the ninety seconds, and it is not reassurance, it is a document.

In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.Ephesians 1:13

Sit on the grammar of that for a moment, because the grammar is the comfort. Were sealed. Past. Done. Not being sealed, not going to be sealed if you keep it up. And notice the second thing: it does not say you sealed yourself. Somebody else applied it. A seal in the ancient world was not a feeling and not an effort, it was a mark of ownership pressed into wax by the owner, and the object being sealed did not participate in the sealing. It just got sealed.

You were sealed, and you were sealed by God Himself with His own Spirit, and it happened without your assistance and it holds without your attention. That is what the word says, in the past tense, and the seal is the Holy Spirit, which means the keeping and the Keeper are not two things you have to hold together.

So consider what was happening during your ninety seconds. You were not thinking about Christ. You were thinking about a fish van and a pushchair and the worst thing you have ever imagined. Your attention was fully occupied elsewhere, and every single second of it, you were sealed. The seal did not weaken while you panicked. It does not run on your vigilance any more than your husband stopped existing when you could not see him over the crowd.

You have an assurance that does not have a threshold in it, and there is no level of alertness you could fall below. The written word grounds it in what Christ has done and in the Spirit who is described as the first part of it, given now, not in how much of that you can feel on a Saturday.

Let me be plain about the other half of that too, because a person who has ever been frightened by this subject deserves it said. Nothing in these pages is going to tell you when. There is no date here, no chart, no sequence, and nothing in the news is being read to you as a countdown. Not because it is a secret we are keeping, but because that was never what this hope was given for. It was given to a grieving church so they could bear a graveside. Anything that makes you more frightened than you were before you read it has misused it.

And there is something for your mouth to do. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Said out loud, not held. And what is in your way is not the market. It is an old sentence that has never been answered by anybody, including you.

You have real authority to answer it out loud, and it is yours because Christ is in you rather than because you feel certain this morning. Scripture is the ground and the Holy Spirit carries the words; the outcome of that, and what He does with the fear over time, He does in His own way.

If the grief since April has gone somewhere darker, and there are hours when being here at all feels like too much, please tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. Grief that heavy is not a spiritual failure and it is not a lack of hope. It is a weight, and weights are carried by more than one person.