The card is written and it is on the table and she is not going to send it.
She writes them anyway. That is the part she has not told anybody, because saying it out loud makes it sound like something a person should be gently talked out of. Birthdays, and the two at Christmas, and one in April for a child she has not met. She writes them properly, in the good pen, and then she puts them in the drawer with the others.
It is a Thursday afternoon in a kitchen that is far too quiet for the size of it.
Ten months since the last proper contact. It did not end in one afternoon. It thinned. There was a thing said at a funeral and a thing said after it, and then the calls got shorter and the replies got slower, and at some point in the autumn she realized she was the only one starting anything, and then she stopped and nothing came the other way.
She does not have the address for certain. That is the detail that finishes her. Not the argument, not the silence: the fact that a woman can be unsure of the postcode where her own grandchildren sleep.
The kettle is loud in here now. She notices things like that. The clock in the hall, the boiler firing, the noise the fridge makes when it settles. A house learns a new set of sounds when the people stop coming.
Everybody has gone back to their lives. Her friends were wonderful in the spring and they are wonderful now, they just do not ask any more, and she does not blame them, because ten months of the same answer would wear anybody down.
Somebody at church said, at the door, in real love: you will feel joy again, you know. The Lord will pour it out on you.
She said thank you. She got in the car and thought about it the whole way home, and what she felt was not comfort. It felt like a job. Like one more thing she was failing to produce. Because she has tried, in the middle of the night, to feel one good thing, and she cannot make it happen, and she has started to think quietly and privately that she never will.
So she sits at the table on a Thursday afternoon with a written card in front of her and a drawer full of the others.
Maybe that is where you are. Long past the argument. Long past anybody asking. Sitting in a house that sounds wrong, holding something you cannot post.
The word, corrected, before anything else happens
The name of this site is going to do some work on you if I leave it alone, so let me handle it now.
Abundance is not the phone ringing again. It is not a family put back the way it was and it is not a Christmas that looks like the ones in the photographs. And it is not money, which is what the word sounds like and what many people arriving here have been hoping for. Abundance is fullness of life, which is the whole of what the Shepherd meant when He said He came so that His own would have life and have it to the full.
You have that fullness at a kitchen table on a Thursday, with an unsent card in front of you. It is written in John 10 and not in anything I have decided about you, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a house that has gone quiet.
Nothing further down this page widens that word or slides anything else underneath it.
Poured, not produced
Here is the verse this site is named out of, and I want you to watch what the verbs are doing.
To give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.Isaiah 61:3
To give. Every one of them is given. Beauty is given, the oil is given, the garment is given. Not one of the three is described as something the mourner works up and then presents.
Oil is poured. That is what oil does and it is why the word is oil. It runs down over somebody who is standing still. The person under it is not doing the pouring and could not, and the whole picture falls apart the moment you make them responsible for it.
So when somebody says you will feel joy again and it lands on you like a task, that is not the verse. The verse has God pouring and a mourning person receiving, and the mourning person is not asked to generate a single drop of it.
You are not disqualified from that oil by ten months, and you were not disqualified by the argument at the funeral either. Isaiah 61 names mourning as the exact condition the oil is poured on, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the pouring rather than the one who inspects the mourner first.
What is not being said here
I will be plain, because this is the category where pages tend to overreach.
I am not telling you the feeling will arrive this week or in any week. I am not putting a date on it. If a day comes when something good goes through you unannounced, it will not be because you managed it correctly, and if today is not that day, nothing about you has failed. The absence of a feeling is not unbelief and it never was.
I am also not going to hand you a method for the silence. There is no sentence I can give you that opens somebody else's phone, and I will not stand between a person and their own children with a technique. Their will is theirs, and I am not going to declare over it, and anybody who does is selling something.
And I am not going to offer gladness to you as a swap for what is missing. If joy arrives, it will not fill the chair. Both things get to be true in the same kitchen.
You are held in the gap between those two, which is where most of the real Christian life actually happens. Scripture keeps mourning and gladness in the same verse without resolving them, and His Spirit is the one who lets a person carry both without pretending either one is over.
The oil goes on people who are still mourning
Here is what I want you to see in the middle of that verse, because it is easy to read past.
He does not pour the oil on the far side of the mourning. He pours it on mourning. Present tense, mid grief, in the middle of the actual condition. The word does not describe a person who has recovered enough to be anointed. It describes mourners, and the oil goes on them there.
You have been anointed in the mourning rather than after it, and that is Isaiah's own arrangement and not a kindness I have added at the end, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries something warm into a room where nothing has changed.
Nothing about the drawer is settled by that. The cards are still in it. I am not going to write a better ending than the one that is actually there.
Something can be received at this table, on a Thursday, with the drawer still full.
You are a person the oil is poured on, in the condition you are actually in. Isaiah 61 puts the oil of joy on mourning rather than on people who have finished mourning, and the Holy Spirit pours it and the One who makes a heavy woman able to receive anything at all.
Nothing is required of you here and there is nothing to work up. Gladness is His to pour and it was never yours to manufacture, which means the pressure that has been sitting on you for ten months can come off now. So open your hands. God's people have always received with the body before they understood with the head.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at the table, hands open. You have the standing to say them because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and ten months of silence does not alter where a person is seated. What He does with the months ahead is His to decide, and however He answers over any of it, these three are true this afternoon. They rest on what is written in Isaiah 61 rather than on anything I could talk you into, and His Spirit is the one who carries them into a very quiet kitchen.
- Drawer with the unsent cards in it, you are full of ten months and you are not the sum of my life. Scripture says God pours the oil of joy on people who are mourning, and He wrote it with no clause about how long the mourning has run. In the name of Jesus I open my hands instead of counting what is in that drawer.
- Whisper that I am done feeling anything good, you are dismissed and you do not get another Thursday from me. Gladness in Isaiah 61 is poured on mourners rather than produced by them, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying the jar. My hands are open, and open hands are the whole of what this asks of me.
- Father, You pour the oil of joy on mourning people and You said so in Isaiah without setting a date anywhere near it. You are here in a kitchen at four o'clock and You are not measuring how long this has taken me. Pour what is Yours to pour, and my hands are open, palms up, for the whole of the last song.
Isaiah 61:3
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
