The boots are still by the back door and the mud on them is from the eleventh, which was a Wednesday, and she can tell you the exact stretch of path it came off.
Nobody has moved them. Her husband has not, because he does not know whether moving them would be a kindness or a statement, and she has not, because she cannot get down there and do it with one hand and mean it.
Six weeks. The stroke came on a Sunday morning while she stood at this very sink filling the kettle, it took the left side of her, and the consultant has been careful and honest and has promised her nothing about what comes back.
The rucksack is on its hook in the porch. The laminated route cards are in the drawer under the map, thirty years of them in her own handwriting, with the timings and the escape routes and the bit about the wall to follow in poor visibility. The compass is in the side pocket where it has always been.
She is fifty eight. She has walked groups over those tops since she was twenty seven.
The flowers have stopped arriving, which is what happens at six weeks. The cards have stopped. Two people who came every day for a fortnight now send a message on a Sunday, and she is not bitter about it, because she knows what a fortnight of somebody else's crisis costs.
The group message still goes off on Wednesday evenings with photographs from the tops. She has not muted it, and she cannot explain to anybody, including herself, why.
This afternoon her sister said something on the phone about taking it one step at a time and thinking about the future when she is stronger, and she said yes, got off the phone, and sat in the chair by the window.
And here is what she cannot say out loud to anybody. It is not that the future looks frightening. It is that when she tries to picture next year, any part of it, a Tuesday in it, there is nothing there at all. Not a bad picture. No picture. Like looking at a wall where a window used to be.
Maybe that is roughly where you are. Everybody around you is being encouraging about a future you cannot get a single image of, and you have started nodding because it is quicker than explaining that the frame is empty.
The word on the sign, plainly
The name over this page sounds like money and it is not money, and I would rather say so in the first minute than let it sit there.
Abundance is fullness of life. That is what the word means in the sentence it comes from, where the Shepherd says He came so that people would have life to the full, and it is not a payout and it is not a body handed back. I am saying it early because everything else here depends on the word having been corrected first.
Fullness of life is a thing that is being given to a woman in a chair by a window who cannot picture next Tuesday. That is exactly why the definition has to come before anything else.
You are held this afternoon in the chair you are actually sitting in, with the frame as empty as it is, and this is not my encouragement to you. The psalm says my times are in Your hand, Psalm 31 puts it in those words, and the Holy Spirit makes a sentence like that carry weight in a body that has stopped doing what it did.
I am not going to describe next year to you
There is a kind of comfort that hands you a picture, and I am not going to do it.
I will not tell you what will grow out of this or what you will end up doing instead. I do not know. Nobody in your kitchen knows, and the ones guessing out loud are trying to fill the empty frame for you because your silence about it frightens them. That is love in an awkward coat, and you can forgive it and still not take the picture.
I am also not going to tell you that this was arranged, or that it came with a purpose folded inside it, or that there is a version of you further down the road who is glad it happened. Those are the comfortable sentences. They are not true and I will not put one in your hand while the mud is still on the boots.
You have a future being kept for you by somebody other than yourself, and that is the whole of what I am saying, and it is what is written in Psalm 31 about times being in His hand rather than a description of what is in it. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes kept mean kept in a room where the imagination has gone flat.
Notice how little that asks of you. It does not ask you to picture anything. It does not ask you to be hopeful, which is a feeling, and is not currently available, and is not being requested. It says the times are in a hand, the hand is not yours, and that has been true for six weeks including on the days you could not lift your head off the pillow.
Six weeks, and the empty frame
I want to stay with the empty frame a minute, because most people get it wrong and managing their reaction has probably fallen to you as well.
An empty frame is not despair. It is not a lack of faith and it is not a warning sign about your walk with God. It is what happens to the imagination when the thing you did with your body for thirty years stops, because a picture of next year is built out of the pieces of this year, and the pieces are not there. That is mechanical. It is not spiritual failure.
And you are allowed to say that nothing comes when you try. That is a legitimate answer to a well meant question, and it is a great deal more honest than the nodding.
You were not left on your own on that Sunday morning at the sink, and you have not been left in the six weeks since, including the hours nobody was in the house. That is what is written about the God who holds a person's times rather than something I put together to be kind, and the Holy Spirit has been in the room the whole while, on the good afternoons and on the other ones.
So the fullness we started with is not a fuller diary and it is not the tops again. It is a fuller person. It is being able to feel things without them knocking you over. It is prayer that is not a negotiation. It is being loved while producing nothing at all, which most people never learn.
You are not being asked to build tomorrow tonight. Scripture gives a person one day at a time on purpose and never once hands out next year in advance, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a single ordinary day enough to stand on when the year will not come into focus.
Something can be received in that chair by the window, this afternoon, with the frame as empty as it is and the boots exactly where they are.
You are kept right now by hands that are not yours and were never going to be yours, and this is not a picture of the future and not a promise about your body. My times are in Your hand, says Psalm 31, and the keeping went on through all six weeks including the parts you do not remember clearly, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a person whose imagination has gone flat. Nothing is being asked of you.
So say the small true thing out loud. A sentence said with the mouth stops being a fog that has settled over an afternoon and becomes ground under a person in the presence of God, and His people have always found their feet by opening their mouths on what He has already settled.
Declare this over yourself
Say these three out loud. You have the standing to say them because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and a body that has changed does not alter where a person is seated. What next year holds is His to decide, and however He answers, these three are true this afternoon. They rest on Psalm 31 rather than on anything I could talk you into, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes them steady in a room where the frame is empty.
- Boots by the back door, you are thirty years of Wednesdays and you are not the whole of my life, and I am not going to look at you as if you were. My times are in His hand, Psalm 31 says it in those words, and the hand has never once been mine. In the name of Jesus I stop trying to picture next year and I take the day I have actually been given.
- Thought that I am finished as a person, you are dismissed, and you do not get the chair by the window any longer. God has kept every one of these six weeks including the ones I cannot remember properly, and the keeping was never conditional on what my left side could do. Fullness of life is what He gives, and He is giving it in this chair this afternoon.
- Lord, You are holding a future I cannot picture and You have not once asked me to picture it. You know the mud on the boots and the date it came off the path, You know the Wednesday photographs, and You know what happens in me when somebody says the word future. Keep tomorrow, and I am naming one small thing in it out loud and leaving the rest with You.
Psalm 31:15
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