The Taxi and the Long Way Round

He parks on the corner by the lit window because the light is company and because you can see the road both ways.

Eleven days.

That is how long since he sat down at his own table with all of them at it. He gets in at about five and they are asleep, and he sleeps while they are out, and he leaves at six in the evening while his wife is doing the dinner, and she puts a plate under foil for him for later and he eats it in the car about eleven.

Tonight the plate is on the passenger seat and it is a rice thing his mother taught his wife to make and it is very good and he is eating it out of a plastic box on a street.

His daughter is in the second year and she is doing well. That is the whole point and he is not confused about it. He is not a man who needs telling why he is doing this.

But there is a thing his cousin said at the christening, and it was meant warmly, and it will not leave him. He said: brother, God is going to increase you. And then he said the other thing people say, which was about favor, and he clapped him on the shoulder and went to get a plate.

Increase.

He looks at the window of the cafe, which is closing, and the woman inside is putting chairs up.

He is not increasing. He is subtracting, every night, on purpose, and it is the right thing and he would do it again and it is nothing like the word that got said over him with a hand on his shoulder in a room full of family.

If you are spending yourself down on purpose for somebody and keep hearing words about increase, you know that corner. And you know the sentence: whatever that word means, it does not describe eleven days, and I do not know where to put it.

What the word means before anybody claps your shoulder

Let me get in the passenger side and say the plain thing, and then eat while I talk.

Your cousin said a true word and attached it to the wrong picture. In his head, increase meant more. More coming in, more visible, more of everything. He meant it entirely kindly and he would be horrified to know it landed the way it did.

So let me set the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean things are increasing. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. That is what it means in Scripture from one end to the other. It is a statement about where God is looking, and it does not read off a bank, a calendar or a plate eaten in a car.

Now let me show you where Luke puts the word favor, because he puts it somewhere very strange.

And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.Luke 2:52

That is the last verse before the story jumps. Jesus is twelve in the verse before it, and thirty in the next chapter. Which means Luke uses the word increased about eighteen years in which nothing whatsoever is recorded.

Eighteen years of a carpenter's shop in a town nobody wrote about. No miracles. No crowd. No account of a single day of it. And Luke's summary of the whole stretch is: He increased in favor with God and man.

You are inside the kind of years Luke describes with that exact word, and eighteen of them went unrecorded without anybody's favor being in doubt. Luke 2:52 covers hidden years with the language of increase, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse about a workshop in Nazareth and lays it on a man eating rice out of a box on a corner.

Increase is not the opposite of spending yourself

Now the word increase itself, because your cousin's version and Luke's version are not the same word doing the same job.

Increase in Luke means to grow forward, to advance, to press on. It is used elsewhere for the night being far spent and the day being at hand. It is a word about movement rather than accumulation.

And that changes what eleven days is.

You are not subtracting. You are advancing something. Your daughter is in her second year and she is doing well and that did not happen by itself. There is a specific structure holding her there and you are it, at night, on a corner, with a plate under foil, and it is the least visible thing in your entire family and it is the load bearing wall.

You are advancing something that will stand up long after the eleven days are forgotten, and Luke's word for that is the same one your cousin used. Luke 2:52 uses increase for a life going forward rather than a life getting fuller, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one bearing patience and faithfulness in a person, which is exactly what a man is spending on a night shift.

And I want to say the honest half too. Eleven days is a real cost. It is not secretly a good thing and I am not going to turn it into one. You are missing your own table, and your wife is running that house on her own most evenings, and your daughter will finish her course and there will be a stretch of years in this family that nobody photographed. God did not arrange this to teach anybody anything.

You are favored and you are absent from your own table, and both of those are true in this car tonight. The written word records eighteen years without recording one of them, and it is His Spirit who makes a man able to hold the cost and the favor at once without needing one to explain the other.

With God and man, in that order again

One more thing, and it is about who is doing the noticing.

Luke says in favor with God and man. And in Nazareth, for eighteen years, the man half of that meant a small number of people who knew him as the carpenter, and nobody else on earth. The whole world's opinion of those eighteen years was: nothing. There was no opinion. There was nothing to have one about.

And God's half was full the entire time.

So the ratio in that verse, during the years it is actually summarizing, is one very small circle and one complete heaven.

You are known completely by the one whose knowing counts, and the smallness of the circle that sees this has never once reduced it. Luke 2:52 names God first and describes years nobody watched, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one making that a present fact about a man rather than a nice observation about a village.

I am not going to tell you when this stretch ends. I do not know. Your daughter has a course with a length and after that there will be something else, because there always is. What is written is where the favor sat during eighteen years of a life that produced no headlines at all.