The Suitcase By The Door

He packed it on the Tuesday.

Not much in it. He is not a dramatic man and he would want that said. Two shirts, the good sandals, his mother's photograph, the small book he has carried since he was nineteen. He put it by the door in the hall because that is where a suitcase goes when a person is leaving.

He had told them. That is the part that matters. He had sat at that table and said, plainly and without any hedging, that God had shown him a thing was going to happen, and roughly when, and he had watched his sister's face and his son's face take it in and decide to believe him because he was the sort of man they believed.

The day came. It was an ordinary day. There was weather, and somebody rang about a delivery, and the bread was slightly overproved because he had not been paying attention.

And it did not happen.

He sat up that night for a long time. Not praying particularly. Just sitting, in a chair, in a hallway, next to a suitcase.

And in the morning he had to come down and put the water on and be at that table with all of them, and he has never in his life wanted so badly to have somewhere else to be.

Nobody said anything. That was worse.

If you have ever come downstairs into a room full of people who heard you say it, sit down here a minute. Nobody is going to ask you to explain what happened.

Although is a real word and Scripture puts it in the mouth of a prophet

There is a passage that people quote for the end of it and skip the front, and the front is the part written for a hallway with a suitcase in it.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat.Habakkuk 3:17

Read what that man is actually looking at. Not a delay. A failure, itemized, crop by crop. He does not say it might not blossom. He says it did not, and then he lists the rest of it, and the listing is the point, because a person in that condition is not helped by somebody hurrying them past the inventory.

Habakkuk is allowed to say the whole of it out loud before he says anything else.

You are allowed to say what did not happen, and saying it is not the end of anything. Habakkuk 3:17 puts an itemized failure into Scripture without one word of correction attached, and it is the Holy Spirit who carried that sentence down to a man sitting in a hallway, which means naming it plainly is a thing the word itself does.

And then, only then, the yet.

Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:18

Notice what the yet does not do. It does not explain the empty vines. It does not say the failure was secretly a mercy or that the fig tree was wrong to look barren. It puts a man's joy somewhere that the harvest cannot reach, and leaves the harvest exactly as bad as it was.

The timing was wrong. That is a different thing from the faith.

Now here is the distinction that has to be made carefully, because everything turns on it and the wrong version of it is cruel.

Your timing was wrong. That is a fact and I am not going to soften it, because a man who is told he was not really wrong knows he is being managed.

But the timing and the faith are two things, and only one of them failed.

You are still standing in what you actually believed, and it did not fall over on Tuesday. 2 Timothy 1:12 has a man in a prison saying I know whom I have believed, and the object of that sentence is a Person rather than a schedule, and it is His Spirit who holds a person steady when the schedule turns out to be theirs rather than His.

I am not going to tell you why it did not happen. Nobody can and nobody should, and anybody who hands you a reason for it is inventing one. What I can tell you is what did not happen when it did not happen: God did not stop being God, you did not stop being His, and the thing you were reaching for is not disqualified because you put a date on it.

You have not been abandoned in that hallway, and He was in it with you all night. Deuteronomy 31:8 says He goes before you and will not leave you, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Helper for exactly the nights when a man is sitting up next to a suitcase, which means that hallway was never as empty as it looked.

And one more thing, said plainly. Nobody at that table thinks less of you. They are not saying anything because they do not know what to say, and silence from people who love you is almost never a verdict. It is usually just silence.