Everybody Here Is Buying For Spring

The trolley in front of her has four paper sacks of seed potatoes in it and a man arguing pleasantly with his wife about whether they need another dahlia.

February in a garden center, the middle Saturday, and the place is packed. The heaters are on over the door and the mats are wet. There is a whole aisle of onion sets in open trays with a scoop in each one and people going along it the way people go along a pick-and-mix. Somebody's grandson is being lifted up to see the fish. The tills are going and the woman on the second till has a cold and keeps apologizing for it.

She is here for one bag of compost, because the pot by her front door died in the frost and she thought she might put something in it.

And standing in the line with the bag against her leg she notices, all at once, what everybody around her is actually doing. They are buying for April. For June. That man is buying a dahlia for a garden he expects to be standing in, in a summer he expects to have. The onion sets are an act of confidence. The whole shop is full of people spending money on a future they take entirely for granted, and there is a lightness in the room because of it, and she is not in it.

Not because she is dying. Nothing so dramatic. Because if she is honest, there is nothing in front of her. Not this month, not this year. Nothing anybody would buy a bulb for. Somebody at work asked her on Thursday what she had on this weekend and she said the usual, and the usual is the word she has been using for about six years.

Perhaps you know that line. It might not be a garden center. It might be the way other people talk about the summer, or a diary you look at on a Sunday night, or the small flat feeling that everybody else is living forward and you are simply living. And you are not bitter. You are just not expecting anything, and you have stopped noticing that you are not.

Something is actually being prepared

Here is the first thing, and it is the thing this whole site is built on.

There is a feast at the end of the story, and it is not a private wish, not a comforting idea, and not a metaphor for something vaguer. It is an event. It has a host, a menu, a mountain and a company of guests, and the company is a people: the church, the whole gathering of everyone who belongs to Christ, across every century and every continent. That is who He has committed Himself to. And what is ahead of that people is ahead of every single person in it.

That is the grammar of the whole thing and it matters. Nobody is telling you that something nice is about to happen to you personally. You are being told what a people has coming, and then shown that you are in the people, and the showing is the Holy Spirit's own work rather than a trick of encouragement.

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.Isaiah 25:6

Notice who is doing the preparing. The Lord of hosts. Nobody in that verse is on a schedule. There is no bring-a-dish, no contribution, no earning of a chair. He makes it, for all peoples, on His mountain, and He is making it whether or not anybody in the line in February has noticed.

You are inside the people that verse was written about, and the preparation is going on now without needing anything from you. That is the plain sense of the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient promise to a whole nation land on one person holding a bag of compost.

What is being cleared away

Read on a couple of verses, because Isaiah does not leave it as catering.

He says God will swallow up death for ever, and wipe away the tears from every face, and take away the reproach of His people from all the earth. Every face. Not most of them. And the reproach, which is the old word for the thing a person carries about themselves after years of watching other people be expected somewhere.

So the feast is not a reward handed out at the end of a long stretch of nothing. It is the end of the thing that made the stretch feel like that.

You have been included in a promise that deals with the exact ache you have, and it was made long before you had it. Scripture says the tears go from all faces and the reproach comes off His people, and the Holy Spirit is the deposit of that, given now as the guarantee of a thing not yet in the room.

I am not going to put a date on it. This site does not do that and I would not know how. Nor am I going to tell you that your circumstances change, that this year is different, or that something is about to turn up in your diary. I do not know, and that promise is not mine to make, and you have had enough of people making it.

What I can tell you is that the thing ahead of God's people is real, that it is in His calendar rather than ours, and that being in that people is a standing rather than an achievement.

Living forward is not the same as being expected

Now the part I most want you to hear, and it comes straight out of that aisle of onion sets.

There is a difference between having plans and being expected. Everyone in that shop had plans. Plans are lovely and they are also fragile, and the man with the dahlia does not know what June holds any more than anybody else in that line. The written word never grounds hope in a plan, and the Holy Spirit was not given as a forecast. What you were watching was not certainty. It was confidence, and confidence is a mood.

Being expected is a different order of thing. It does not depend on your energy, your health, your diary, or whether you can think of anything to look forward to on a Thursday. Somebody has to be doing the expecting, and in this case it is God, and He is not liable to change His mind between now and then.

You were made part of a people who are expected, and being expected is not something a person arranges for themselves. The written word puts the whole company at that table, and the Holy Spirit does not seat half a household and leave the rest of it standing about at the back.

And hear the other half, plainly, because this site will not do emotional pressure. None of this depends on how you feel about it in the line. If you finish reading with no rush of anything at all, nothing has failed and nobody is disappointed in you. Warmth is not the ticket. You are genuinely expected somewhere while feeling absolutely flat about it on a wet Saturday in February.