She has done it again. There is enough in the pan for two and there is one of her.
Saturday, about half six, and the light is doing the thing it does through the kitchen window at this time of year. She stands there with the wooden spoon in her hand looking at it. It is not even a dish they particularly liked. It is just the amount her hands know.
Five months. The photographs are still up in the hall, all four of them, because taking them down is not a task, it is an afternoon, and she has not got an afternoon like that in her yet. She goes past them twice a day and has developed a way of not quite looking.
The second toothbrush went in March. She did that one on a Tuesday, quickly, the way you pull a plaster, and then sat on the edge of the bath for twenty minutes afterwards.
Nobody did anything monstrous. That is the part people cannot place. There was no other person and there was no courtroom, there was a long slow coming apart that neither of them could stop, and a last conversation in this kitchen that was almost unbearably polite. She would rather have a villain. A villain would at least be a shape.
At five months the phone has gone quiet in the particular way it does. Her friends were magnificent for about eight weeks and then their own lives quite properly resumed. Her mother rings on Sundays and asks whether she is eating.
And people keep saying that God gives everything back. Double, somebody said, at a table, with real warmth. She smiled and said thank you, and she thought: I do not want double. I did not want a bigger one. I wanted that one, and it is not coming, and I do not know what you do with a sentence like that.
Maybe that is roughly where you are. Somebody read you the line about beauty for ashes and it went straight over the top of you. And if you came to a page called this hoping the second word meant something arriving in the post, I am not going to make you feel small about it. Nobody in a ruin reaches for the sophisticated thing first.
The word first
Abundance is not money, and it is not the house full again. It is fullness of life, which is what the Shepherd said He came for in John 10, and the noun in that sentence is life and not possessions. That is the definition, it is the only one this site will hand you, and it is not a promise about your circumstances.
I am saying it plainly because a page like this one can very easily start hinting. It will not. There is no arrangement coming that I know about, and I have no information about your future to sell you.
And I am going to say the other thing plainly too, because it has been said to you forty times already. Nobody is handing you a copy of what you lost. Not a better one, not a bigger one, and not the same one repaired. I do not know a single verse that promises it and I am not inventing one to be encouraging.
You are held while I say that. Scripture puts the Lord near to the brokenhearted, without a clause about how well the person is taking the news, and the Holy Spirit keeps a woman upright in a kitchen while a page refuses to promise her the thing she wants most.
What the oaks verse actually says
Isaiah 61 is where this whole site gets its name. It says beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, and then it says something people quote less often, that they shall be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord.
Read it slowly, because it does not say what people usually make it say. It does not say the burnt ground is put back the way it was. It does not say the tree that came down is replanted. It says something is planted, by Him, in that ground, and that what grows there is called by His name.
An oak is not a repair. It is a different thing entirely, growing on the same site, and it takes the time an oak takes.
I am not going to tell you what will grow in your life or when, because I do not know, and anybody who tells you they do is selling something. What I will tell you is what the verse says: the planting is His work rather than yours, and it happens in ground that has been through it.
You have not been left to make something of this on your own. That is written into the phrase itself, the planting of the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit who does in a person what a person could never manufacture in themselves on a Saturday evening in front of a pan.
The small living thing
Here is where people go wrong with growth, and it is worth naming so you can stop bracing for it. They use it to close the grief. They say something is growing so that you will stop crying about what burnt.
That is not what I am doing and it is not what God does. He does not use a new thing to end the conversation about the old one. The grief and the growth run alongside each other for a long while, and He is not embarrassed by either.
So do not go looking for something impressive. What is actually growing in a life at five months is nearly always small enough to be missed: a friendship that got real because the pretending stopped. A tolerance for other people's grief that you did not have before. Fifteen minutes of prayer that is finally honest. A neighbor you speak to now.
You are being grown in, quietly, in ways that are not a replacement for anybody and are not compensation for anything. Scripture calls it the planting of the Lord, in Isaiah 61, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing it rather than a process you have to get right.
And the photographs can stay up
There is no schedule here and there is nobody keeping one.
The hall can stay as it is until the afternoon comes when it does not. Taking them down is not a spiritual milestone and leaving them up is not a failure of faith. Anybody who tells you there is a right week for it has never stood in that hall.
You were loved on the day of the last polite conversation in that kitchen, at the hour it was happening, and you are loved this evening with too much in the pan. That is not sentiment. It is written as love commended toward us while we were still a long way from sorted, in Romans 5, and His Spirit is the one who takes a sentence that size and gets it as far as a Saturday.
Something can be received in that kitchen this evening, with the photographs still up in the hall and too much food in the pan.
You are inside a promise that never once mentioned your circumstances. Isaiah 61 puts the planting in His hands and the ground is described as ruined right there in the same passage, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the growing rather than a process you have to manage correctly on a Saturday.
Nothing here is going to be predicted for you. No timetable, no description of the years ahead of you, and no promise that anything is coming to fill the shape of what went. What is settled is that the planting is His work, that He is doing it in a person and not in a set of arrangements, and that He has never required the ground to look presentable first.
So name the small thing out loud. It will feel disloyal for about a second, because saying anything is alive can sound like saying the loss did not matter. It does not, and it never has. A thing said with the mouth stops being a private suspicion and becomes ground under your feet, and God's people have always found their footing by saying out loud what He is actually doing.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud. You have the standing to say them because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the ending of a marriage did not move a person out of that seat. What grows, and when, and what your life looks like a year from here, is His to decide, and however He answers over any of it, these three are true this evening. They rest on what is written in Isaiah 61 rather than on anything I could talk you into, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries them into a kitchen at half past six.
- Wedding photographs in the hall, you are four frames on a wall and you are not a deadline. Scripture calls what grows here the planting of the Lord, which puts the work on His side and the timing with it, and there is no schedule written anywhere for the afternoon I take you down. In the name of Jesus I walk past you tonight without owing you anything.
- Fear that I am a person who gets left, you are dismissed from this kitchen and you do not get to name me. I was loved on the day of the last polite conversation in this room, at the hour it was happening, and Romans 5 puts that love a long way ahead of anybody being sorted. Something is alive in my life tonight that I did not manufacture, and I am saying so with the pan still on the ring.
- Lord, You plant in ground that has been through it and You have never asked the ground to look presentable first. You know the second toothbrush and the twenty minutes on the edge of the bath, and You are not embarrassed by how long this is taking. Grow what You are growing in me and I will not ask You to make it a copy, and I am naming the small living thing out loud tonight.
Isaiah 61:3
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