I Was Not Shopping

It arrives tomorrow or the day after, and you already know how you will feel when it does, which is nothing much.

That is the part people who do not do this find hard to understand. The buying is not the point and the object is not the point. By the time it turns up the whole thing is over, because the event happened at eleven at night and the event was not about the thing.

You were not shopping. You were doing something else with a shop.

And there is a rule that arrives about four minutes afterwards, and the rule says: that was weak, and a person with any self-control would not have done that, and you have done it again.

I am not going to add anything to that rule. It has plenty of support already. What I want to do is ask what you were actually reaching for, and then say something true about where that is available.

Come, without money

There is an invitation in Isaiah that opens with a shout and is one of the least conditional sentences in the Bible.

Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. (Isaiah 55:1, King James Version)

Every one that thirsteth.

Not everybody who deserves it, or who has managed their week well, or who has not just done the thing at eleven o'clock. The qualification is thirst, which is not an achievement, it is a condition, and it is the one condition you definitely meet tonight.

And then, twice: without money, and without price.

Isaiah 55:1 goes out of its way to say the thing is free, in a passage aimed at people who are spending on what does not satisfy, and it does not scold them for the spending, it tells them where the water is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that arrive as an invitation rather than as a correction.

You are qualified by thirst rather than by conduct, and there has never once been a price on it. Isaiah 55:1 addresses every one that thirsteth and says without money and without price twice over, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person hear an invitation at the moment they were braced for a rebuke.

What was actually being soothed

So let me ask the question the rule never asks.

What happened that day.

Almost always there is something. A conversation that went badly. A day where nobody asked you anything. A slow anxiety about something you cannot fix. Loneliness of the particular kind that arrives when the house goes quiet.

And at eleven at night, with a phone in your hand, there is a thing you can do in ninety seconds that produces a small, real, immediate sensation of having been kind to yourself.

That is not a moral collapse. That is a person locating the only comfort that was available at eleven at night in about ninety seconds.

The problem was never the reaching. The reaching is right. Isaiah 55:1 assumes the reaching and simply redirects where it goes, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does not shame an appetite He gave.

You were reaching for something real, and the reaching has never once been the fault in this. The written word says come ye to the waters, spoken to people already spending on what does not satisfy, and the Spirit of God is the one who redirects a thirst without condemning it.

No rule from me

I want to be plain about what this site will not do.

There is no spending rule at the bottom of this page. No waiting period, no list, no removal of an app, no accountability arrangement, no percentage. This site gives no financial advice of any kind and this article is not the exception.

And I am not going to use the word stewardship at you, because in my experience that word arrives most often as a way of putting a religious frame around a telling off, and you have had enough of those and they have not worked.

What is on offer is one sentence said out loud, and it is not a technique either. It is just being honest about what you wanted, to somebody who is awake, and Isaiah 55:1 is the ground for expecting an answer at that hour, and the Holy Spirit is entirely available at eleven at night.

You are not being handed another rule, and none of the rules have ever once been what was missing. Isaiah 55:1 gives an invitation rather than an instruction, and the Spirit of God is the one who is genuinely present at the hour a person is most likely to be ashamed.