The Scroll Carried By Somebody Else

Fifteen years, every fortnight, and it has never once been canceled.

Not for weather, not for illness, not the year his father died. He moved it to a Thursday once because of a wedding and that is the only variation anybody can remember.

Twelve to eighteen people, depending. Some of them have been coming for the whole fifteen years and some of them turned up last spring and have not missed one since.

He does not think of himself as a teacher. He would tell you he opens a passage and gets out of the way, and mostly that is true.

Here is the thing he has come to believe, and he has never said it out loud, and it has been sitting underneath everything for a few years now.

If he stopped, it would end.

Not immediately. There would be a period of people saying somebody should keep it going. And then there would not be.

And because he believes that, he has never been ill on a Tuesday, never taken a holiday that crossed one, never once let a fortnight go by. Which sounds like faithfulness, and is faithfulness, and is also something else that he has only recently started looking at.

He is fifty eight. And a few weeks ago, stacking chairs, he thought: I am the only thing holding this up, and I have been the only thing for fifteen years, and I do not know what happens to a man who believes that about himself.

If you are the only thing holding something up, sit down at this table. Nothing here is an alarm.

The power doing the guarding is named, and it is not yours

There is a sentence Peter writes to people scattered across five provinces and having a very difficult time, and it is worth reading slowly because of who is doing what.

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. Passive, present, continuous. And the power doing it is named and it is God's.

Peter is writing to people who were, in every visible sense, holding something fragile in a hostile place. If anybody ever had grounds for believing that a thing would collapse without them, it was those churches. And the first thing he tells them is that the guarding is not theirs.

You are the one being kept, and that has been true every fortnight for fifteen years. 1 Peter 1:5 puts the guarding in God's power rather than in anybody's stamina, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the seal and guarantee in Ephesians 1:13, which means the thing you have been holding up has had something underneath it the whole time.

A deposit is kept, not carried

Now let me put the other word back where it started, because it changes what your fifteen years have been.

In the world Peter and Paul were writing in, a deposit was ordinary and serious. Somebody going on a journey left a valuable thing with a neighbor. No paperwork, no insurance, nothing to enforce it. Two hands and one person's honor, and two rules: it never became the keeper's property, and it went back in the condition it came in.

Never became the keeper's property. That is the line you have crossed, and you crossed it out of love rather than pride, which is why nobody has ever challenged it.

Paul tells Timothy to guard the good deposit by the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, and the second half of that sentence is the half you have been living without.

You were handed a real thing, and you have never once been holding it on your own. 2 Timothy 1:14 names the Spirit as the strength inside the keeping, which means fifteen years of never missing a fortnight was not fifteen years of you being the only thing in the room.

And notice what the moment with the chairs actually was. You have been shown this early, and you were shown it gently, and nothing has been broken. Romans 2:4 says it is the kindness of God that leads a person, and it is His Spirit who carries it at exactly the temperature a person can take, which is why it came as one thought while stacking chairs rather than as a collapse.

Now the half that makes the watching restful rather than nervous, and this is the whole of this site.

God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. Both hands belong to Him. He is holding what you entrusted to Him and He is holding you while you hold what He entrusted to you. A man who believes he is the only thing between a room and an ending cannot rest, and cannot be ill, and cannot go away in August, and you were never the only thing.