She Kept The Keys For Thirty Years

There is a bunch of keys in that woman's handbag that weighs more than her phone.

Front door, side door, fire doors, the cupboard with the urn, the gas box, the shutter on the serving hatch, and one small brass one that nobody can remember the purpose of and nobody dares throw away.

Thirty years she has had them. She was handed them by a man who is dead now, at a meeting she barely remembers, and he said something to her that afternoon that she could not have repeated the next week and cannot repeat now, and she remembers only that she went home taller than she went out.

Now she opens up on a Saturday and she does not think about it at all.

She is there at seven. She does the heating. She checks the ladies because somebody always leaves the tap. She props the fire door with the block of wood that has been doing that job longer than most of the people who walk past it. And by half eight there are forty people in a warm room eating and shouting at each other, and by four she has washed the last pan and turned the lights off and gone home.

Ask anybody in that town who she is and they will tell you she is the one who has the keys.

Ask her, and she will tell you the same thing, and that is what I want to talk about.

Somewhere in thirty years she stopped being a woman who was trusted with something and became a woman who unlocks a door. Nobody did that to her. There was no meeting. It happened the way these things happen, which is slowly and without anybody deciding.

She has not gone cold. She loves that hall. It is only that the weight in the handbag has stopped meaning anything, and a thing that stops meaning anything is halfway to being put down.

If your keys have gone quiet in your bag, come and sit down at this table. Nothing here is an alarm and nobody is checking up on you.

Somebody looked at their best thing and then looked at you

Let me put the word back where it came from, because thirty years of Saturdays have worn it smooth.

In the world Peter and Paul were writing in, a deposit was a serious and completely ordinary thing. A man going away left something valuable with a neighbor. Coin, deeds, the family's one good item. There was no paperwork and there was no insurance. There were two hands and one man's honor, and two rules that did not bend: it never became the keeper's property, and it went back in the condition it arrived in.

Being handed one was near the top of the compliments a person could receive in that world. Somebody looked at the thing they could least afford to lose, and then looked at you, and decided.

That is what happened in a meeting you barely remember, and it is why you went home taller.

But hold that next to the sentence Peter writes to people scattered all over the place and having a hard time of it.

Who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.1 Peter 1:5

Being guarded. Present tense, continuous, and the power doing it is named and it is not theirs.

You are the one being kept, and that has been true every single Saturday you have opened that door. 1 Peter 1:5 puts the guarding in God's hands rather than yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the seal and the guarantee in Ephesians 1:13, so the weight in your handbag has never once been the thing holding the arrangement together.

The trust did not shrink because your feelings about it did

Now the second half, and this is the one I want you to hear over the noise of forty people eating.

Something was put into your hands on purpose. That is the fact that thirty ordinary years have hidden, and I want to be careful about how I say it, because a woman who cannot feel much concludes very quickly that there is not much there, and that conclusion is nearly always wrong.

You were handed a real thing, and you are still holding it this morning. 2 Timothy 1:14 calls it a good deposit and tells a tired young man to guard it by the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, which means the guarding was never running on how the keys felt in the bag.

What is it, in your case? For Timothy it was a pattern of sound words and a faith that had come down through his grandmother. For you it is a warm room in a cold town. It is forty people who know that on a Saturday there is somewhere to go. It is thirty years of a fire door propped with a block of wood, and a tap checked, and a hall that has never once been locked when it should have been open.

Notice that not one item on that list is a feeling. A deposit is not an atmosphere. You can hold a thing perfectly on a morning when it means nothing to you, and a keeper who guards only what she currently feels is not a keeper.

And notice the second thing, because it is the one that changes the walk home. You have not been demoted from keeper to caretaker, and nothing about the years has reduced what you were given. Romans 11:29 says the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable, and it is His Spirit who keeps them alive in a person long after the ceremony that started them has been forgotten.

God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. That is the whole arrangement, and it has been running underneath your handbag for three decades.