A Word With Nobody To Say It To

It is fine rain. Not drizzle, which is a miserable word, and not a shower. The kind that comes down without any wind behind it and soaks a person through in eleven minutes while they are saying it is hardly anything.

There is a word for that where she used to live. One word, three syllables, and it carries a small amount of affection in it, the way a language does when a thing happens often enough to be a friend.

She is at her sister's sink on a Wednesday with her hands in the water, watching it come down on the yard, and the word arrives in her head the way it always does, and there is nobody in this house to say it to.

Four years. Two suitcases, and the second one is under the bed in the box room and it still has the tag on the handle from the flight, and she has never taken that off and could not tell you why.

The coffee pot is hers. Small, enamel, chipped on the lip, and she still makes it that way every morning, and her sister thinks it is a lovely little habit and says so, and she smiles, and it is not a habit. It is the last working piece of a whole life.

Nineteen years she was there. She had the language properly, the joking kind, the kind where you can be funny, and here it is worth nothing at all. She has said it out loud twice in four years and both times to a phone.

Nobody asks any more. That is what four years does. For the first year they asked, and she was still saying words like temporary, and somewhere in the second year the asking stopped and she became a woman who lives with her sister. Somebody at church said last month, meaning it warmly: it is so lovely that you are back home. She said yes.

She is fifty three. She is not in despair, and it would be easier to explain if she were. It is quieter than that. It is that some time in the third year she came to a settled and unemotional conclusion, standing at this same sink, that whatever it is that other people mean when they say the word joy, that part of her life is over now, and that the rest of it will be perfectly fine, and she should stop expecting anything else.

Maybe that is where you are. Not in the storm. Four years past it, at a sink, in fine rain, holding a word with nobody to say it to.

Let me put the word straight first

Abundance is not the life over there restored.

It is not the flat, the friends, the language being worth something again, it is not the nineteen years handed back, and it is not money, and I am not going to leave the word open so it can quietly become a plan for a woman at a sink. Abundance means fullness of life, and that is the entire meaning.

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.John 10:10

You have that in a box room in your sister's house, and none of it depends on the four years having gone differently. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own words, and the Holy Spirit carries it into a person who came to a quiet conclusion about herself somewhere in the third year.

Joy is poured, and it is not made

Here is the verse this whole page is standing on.

to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.Isaiah 61:3

Read what the noun is doing. Oil. Not a mood, not an attitude, not a decision a woman makes at a sink about how she is going to see things from now on. Oil is a substance and somebody else is holding the jar.

Everything in that verse moves one way. It is given. Beauty is given, oil is given, the garment is handed over, and there is not one item in the list that the mourning person is asked to produce out of their own supply. If four years have gone by with a woman quietly failing to generate gladness, hear what the sentence actually says about whose job it was.

You are not the manufacturer of your own joy and you never were. That is Isaiah 61 putting the oil in God's hand and the mourning in yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the pouring rather than standing back to see whether you can manage it.

I am not going to promise you the feeling

I will not tell you that gladness is on its way to you by a particular route, and I will not put a date on anything, because I do not know and the people who talk like that are guessing at your expense.

What I can tell you is who holds the jar and what He is like, and that the four years have not disqualified you from anything.

Because that is the quiet thing underneath, is it not. Not despair. Just a settled arithmetic that says this has gone on too long now, that whatever window there was has closed, and that a sensible woman adjusts.

You are not disqualified by how long this has taken. There is nothing in the written word that puts a time limit on God's kindness toward a person in mourning, and the Spirit who is called the Comforter is not on a schedule that has run out.

And I am not going to offer it as a swap

One more thing, because this matters and it is where these pages usually go wrong.

Gladness is not being offered to you as a replacement for the life you had. If somebody hands you joy and asks you to accept it instead of nineteen years, that is a trade, and it is a poor one, and you would be right to refuse it.

The oil in Isaiah 61 is poured onto mourning. Not instead of it. The verse does not say the mourning is canceled or that it was worth it, and it does not require you to hand over the word for the rain, or the coffee pot, or the tag on the suitcase handle, before anything is given to you.

You have permission to be a woman who misses her whole life and receives something from God in the same afternoon. Scripture puts oil and mourning in the same sentence and does not treat that as a contradiction, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a person to be finished grieving before He came near.

What is actually asked of you

Almost nothing, and that is not a figure of speech.

The posture in that verse is receiving. Not striving, not deciding to feel differently, not talking yourself round at a sink. Somebody pours, and you hold your hands where the pouring can reach them, and that is the entire part that belongs to you.

You are able to receive today exactly as you are, in fine rain, at a sink, with the word still in your head and nowhere to put it. That is the plain shape of Isaiah 61, oil from Him toward the mourning, and it is the Spirit who brings it near rather than waiting for you to feel ready.