You Have Not Used Them Up

The card was laminated once, years ago, and the lamination had gone milky at the corners where a thousand thumbs had held it flat.

Yvette had it taped to the counter at the returns desk, facing outward so people could read it themselves and she would not always have to be the one saying it. Thirty days. Receipt or bank statement. Tags on, packaging kept. Electricals within fourteen. She had worked that desk for nine years, Thursday to Monday, and she was good at it in a way the shop did not measure, which is that people generally left her counter feeling better than they arrived even when the answer was no.

What almost nobody knew, because it was not printed on the card, was that Yvette could override any of it.

She had a code. Managers gave it out to two or three people per store, and she used hers three or four times a week without a second thought. The woman with the blender and no receipt, whose husband had bought it and then died in March. The teenager with a shirt that had been washed once. The man with the kettle he had been given for a birthday six weeks earlier by somebody who had picked the wrong one on purpose. She would look at the screen, look at the person, type six digits, and say, quietly, that is fine, we can sort that out.

Every single day, Yvette handed out grace over a counter with a card taped to it saying grace was not available.

And she was forty seven, and she had been coming back to God since she was seventeen, and somewhere in the middle of all those years she had quietly decided she was outside the window.

She could not have told you the exact figure. It was not written down. It was more like a feeling that had hardened into arithmetic: at some point, a person who keeps returning to the same door with the same thing in their hands becomes a person the door stops opening for. She thought it was somewhere around the fortieth time. She thought that had been a while ago.

So she had stopped asking. She still went. She still sang some of it. She still prayed for other people, and she was very good at that, and she prayed for them with a confidence she would have laughed at if you had suggested she try it on her own behalf. But the coming back part, the part where you turn round and go home, she had put away years ago, the way you put away a coat that no longer fits.

Nine years of typing six digits for strangers.

And not once, not on one single Thursday, had it occurred to her that the override was pointed in both directions.

Why there is no number on this

The card on the counter exists for a real reason. A shop has finite money, so it has to draw a line somewhere, and the line has to be published or nobody could plan anything. Every policy any of us has ever stood under works this way. There is a stock, the stock runs down, and someone has to guard it.

You have been reading God as a shop.

That is not a stupid mistake. It is the only kind of arrangement most of us have ever been inside. But look at how Scripture words the invitation home, because there is not a quota anywhere in it, and the same Spirit who moved those prophets to write is holding it open in front of you.

Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up.Hosea 6:1

That is written to a nation that had gone off and come back and gone off again for generations. Nobody in that sentence is being told the number. Nobody is being told they are near the limit, or that this is the last one. The invitation is open in a book that is entirely about a people who kept leaving.

So take this as already true of you: you are not near any limit, because there is no counter running. Hosea says come and return, with no figure attached to it anywhere in the chapter, and it is His Spirit and not my saying so that makes a line like that land in somebody who has been counting.

Then Joel, and watch what he protects.

Therefore also now, saith the LORD, turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning: and rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness.Joel 2:12-13

Rend your heart and not your garments. Tearing your clothes was the public performance of grief, and Joel is not attacking sincerity. He is protecting people from a very specific trap: putting on the show of being sorry instead of turning round. Because regret and returning are not the same motion at all. Regret keeps your face pointed exactly where it was and adds pain to it. Turning changes which way you are looking. Joel 2:13 is not measuring anybody's tears; it is naming a direction, and it is His Spirit who turns a face long before the feelings agree to come along.

Yvette had thirty years of rent garments and almost no turning, and she thought the garments were the problem with her. They were not. She was simply exhausted, and she had been sorry for so long that sorry had become the place she lived instead of the door she walked through.

Then the geography, which is the line this whole message is built on.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

Notice which axis he picked. North and south have ends. Go far enough north and you hit a pole and start heading south again, and the distance is measurable and finite. East and west have no such thing. Travel east forever and you never once begin traveling west. The psalmist reached for the only pair of directions in creation that has no meeting point.

This is yours right now and not on review: what has been carried off you has been carried a distance that has no arithmetic in it. That is what Psalm 103:12 says in the axis it chose, and His Spirit is not measuring the gap for you again this evening.

And the compassions, which are the piece that answers the used-them-up feeling directly.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

New every morning. Not replenished from a reserve. Not issued from a stock that goes down as you draw on it. That sentence sits in the middle of the most grief-soaked book in the whole Bible, written by a man watching a city burn, and it is the least sentimental line in Scripture: mercies are not a quantity, so there is no such thing as having spent them.

Which is why the drawing is not yours to manage either. You were being pulled the whole time you thought you were deciding. Scripture says the goodness of God leads a person to repentance and that no one comes unless the Father draws them, and the Spirit at work in you is the reason this article is making your chest ache instead of boring you.