The Bar After the Game

The whistle goes at about ten past four and there is the usual business of shaking hands and somebody looking for a shin pad, and then the twenty minutes in the changing hut, and then it happens the same way it happens every week.

Somebody says, right, and picks up a bag. Somebody else says, are we going then. And then twelve men walk across a car park toward the same door, and Josh gets in his car.

He is thirty four. He has played for this team for nine years. He is not the best player and he is not the worst and last season he scored four, and they are all his friends, in the sense that he would help any of them move a sofa and any of them would help him.

He has never once been the man who leaves before. Not until fourteen months ago.

And the thing about it is that the game is fine. The game is genuinely fine. Ninety minutes of running around on a Sunday afternoon in the cold with people he likes is one of the best things in his week and he would not give it up.

It is the walk across the car park. Twelve men going one way and one man going the other, every single Sunday, and by the time he gets to the car he has already told himself it does not matter, and he has been telling himself that for fourteen months, and it is not getting more convincing.

You know that car park. It might be a team, a shift that goes out after, a choir that goes to the pub, a crew that goes for breakfast. You kept the thing. You lost the after, and the after was where most of the friendship actually lived.

You are inside a promise Jesus made about now and not only about later, and you were never told the account would be settled somewhere else. He said there is no man that hath left house or brethren for His sake who shall not receive an hundredfold now in this time, and the word He chose was now; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live claim in a car park at half past four on a Sunday.

An hundredfold now in this time

Let me name what actually hurts, because it is not the drink and it is not even the bar.

You did not lose the football. You lost the part where you belonged to those men. The game is the reason twelve people are in the same place; the after is where they became friends, and you now have the reason without the result. And you cannot say that to anybody, because on paper you still play, so on paper nothing has been lost, and there is no category for grieving something you technically still have.

Here is what Jesus says, and He says it in answer to a man who has just asked what is in it for the people who have given things up.

Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.Mark 10:29-30

Look at the list. He names the actual things: brothers, sisters, a house, land. He does not spiritualize the loss into something abstract. He accepts that what a person gives up is specific and real, which means He would have counted a car park on a Sunday afternoon without laughing at it.

You are holding a loss Jesus named specifically, and you were never being oversensitive about something He treats as substantial. That is what stands written in Mark 10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man call a walk across a car park a real thing.

And then, an hundredfold now in this time. Now. Not eventually and not in the world to come, which He mentions separately in the very next clause. The compensation He describes is present tense and it is in kind: brothers, sisters, mothers, houses. He is describing a person ending up with more people, in this life, not fewer.

You are promised people in this present time, and you were never signed up for a life with a hole in it where the company used to be. Scripture says now in this time and lists the people by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live expectation for a man of thirty four in a municipal car park.

And notice the two words nobody quotes: with persecutions. He puts the hard part in the same sentence as the promise. He does not sell it. That phrase is the reason the rest of the verse can be trusted, because a promise that admits its own cost is not a sales pitch.

You are given a promise honest enough to name its own cost, and you were never being sold anything. The written word says with persecutions right inside the hundredfold, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that honesty the thing that holds the whole sentence up.

And the plain, useful thing, said the way this site says it. Those twelve men are not rejecting you. They are going where they have always gone, and nobody has thought about it for a second, and that is not coldness, it is just Sunday. The after does not have to be after. It could be Tuesday, or a breakfast, or a lift to an away game. Ask. And if the friend, the counselor, the group that meets on a weeknight where men say exactly this out loud, is what helps, use it, because that is God's kindness with a face on it and it is a genuine road to a table.