A Trolley and No List

The trolley has a wheel that judders on the smooth floor and she has stopped noticing, because she is standing still in the middle of the tinned aisle with both hands on the bar and nothing in the basket, and she has been standing there long enough that a man with a basket has said excuse me twice.

Saturday morning. The big shop, the one on the ring road, loud with children and the tannoy and the beep of the tills. For nineteen years, every Saturday of her life had been written before she woke up. Somebody else's list. Somebody else's hours. Where she could go and how long she could be gone and what came back in the bags. It was not a prison with bars, and nobody would have called it one, and it was a place with the door open the whole time, and she stood inside it for nineteen years because inside was at least the shape of a day. She got out. That is the true sentence and she says it to herself in the aisle. I got out. The door was open, and one day her feet went through it, and now she is a free woman with a trolley in a supermarket at ten in the morning with the whole day and nobody's list.

And it turns out that is the hard part. Not the leaving. The aisle. She thought freedom would feel like a wide field, and it feels like a wide field, and she is standing in the middle of it with no idea which way to walk. She can go anywhere. She cannot think of anywhere to go. She can put anything in the trolley. She stands in front of forty kinds of tinned tomatoes and cannot choose, and the choosing was never the point, and she knows that, and she still cannot choose. She got out, and she cannot work out what she got out for.

The trolley judders. A child goes past on the front of somebody's trolley shouting about crisps. And she stands there with the empty basket thinking a thing that shames her: it was easier with a list.

That aisle is yours. You know exactly what you got out of, and you know the empty field on the far side of it, and you have stood in it wondering whether freedom was supposed to be this quiet. Stay with me. I want to show you the sentence God said when He opened the first door, because it did not stop at let them go.

Let them go, so that

Here is the first thing, and it is a matter of what God actually said before it is a matter of comfort. When He sent Moses to Pharaoh, the sentence He gave him to say has a second half that everybody drops. Not let my people go, full stop. This:

Thus says the LORD, "Let my people go, that they may serve me."Exodus 8:1

That they may serve me. The door out of Egypt was never opened onto an empty field. It was opened onto a purpose. God did not bring a nation out of the brick pits so that they could stand in the desert with a trolley and no list; He brought them out so that they could belong to Him and serve Him, and the whole of the going out was pointing at that from the first plague onward. Freedom in Scripture has a direction. It always did. Out of, and into. Let go, so that.

You were let out for something, and the something is written into the first sentence God ever spoke about setting anybody free. I am not inventing a purpose to fill the aisle. I am reading you the shape of the door, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a woman standing still in a supermarket and turns her toward the so that.

Called to freedom, and then a comma

Now let us name the thing actually happening in that aisle, because you deserve to hear it said back to you plainly. It is not that you want to go back. You do not. It is that the freedom arrived and it was quiet, and the quiet feels like a verdict, as if the door had opened onto nothing and you had made a great deal of noise about walking through it, and now here you stand, out, and nobody handed you the next thing, and the old place at least told you what the day was for. And underneath that, quieter, the fear that the freedom has been standing there a while with nothing done in it, and that a wasted freedom is a kind of failure.

Hear me. Paul wrote to people who had walked out of exactly this kind of place, a religion of lists, and he told them the truth about the door in one sentence with a comma in the middle of it:

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.Galatians 5:13

Called to freedom, and then a comma, and then the direction. Not called to freedom, full stop, go and stand in a field. Called to freedom, comma, serve one another through love. The freedom is the status and the serving is the road out of the aisle, and notice that he does not make it a new rota. He does not say serve or you will be sent back. He says through love, which is not a list; it is a direction a free person walks in because they can, and the Spirit walks it with them.

You have a direction, and it is not a new list, and it did not arrive as an obligation; it arrived as the second half of your own freedom. The word says called to freedom, comma, serve, and the Holy Spirit is the one who fills the comma, in the aisle, without handing you a rota to fail at.

Purpose is not a new cell

I have to be careful with you here, and I know it, because I am a fire person and a fire person can take a sentence like serve one another and build a whole prison out of it and call it a calling. So let me say what this is not. It is not a demand that you find your purpose by Tuesday. It is not a suggestion that a woman who cannot name her purpose yet has stood in the field too long. It is not another list handed to you at the door of the last one. Peter says live as people who are free, and in the same breath, as servants of God, and he does not sound like a man loading anybody down; he sounds like a man describing what a free person naturally does with their hands.

Because that is the secret of the aisle. Purpose does not arrive as a plan. It arrives as the next person. The man with the basket who said excuse me twice. The woman at the far end who cannot reach the top shelf. Whoever it is who needs a bag carried to a car in the rain. A free person, out, with an empty morning, is exactly the person who can stop and do the small thing, and the small thing is not beneath the purpose; it is the purpose, at the size a morning can hold. You do not have to see the whole road. You have to see the next person, and the door you walked out of gave you the hands and the hours to turn toward them.

You are free, and your freedom has hands, and the hands were given to you for the person in front of you, whoever that turns out to be today. That is what is written in Galatians and in Peter, and it is His Spirit who puts a stranger with a heavy bag in the path of a woman with an empty trolley, and calls it purpose, and does not call it a rota.