The Photographs Still In The Hall

There are three of them on the wall between the coat hooks and the kitchen door, and she goes past them forty times a day.

The middle one is the good one. Somebody caught it between the church door and the car and neither of them is looking at the camera. His hand is on her back. She is laughing at something that was not funny.

Two years.

She has taken the photographs down twice. Both times she got as far as the hall floor and then put them back on the hooks, because a blank patch of wall with two years of sun around it is a worse thing to walk past than a photograph, and because taking them down properly is not a five minute job, it is an afternoon she has not had in her yet.

There is one toothbrush in the pot in the bathroom. There is a side of the bed she still does not use, and she has never once decided that, it is simply where she sleeps now.

It was not a betrayal and there is no story to tell people. Nothing dramatic and nothing court shaped, which is worse in company, because a story gives people somewhere to put their sympathy and she does not have one. It ended. It had been ending for a long time, too slowly to point at.

Two years is long enough that nobody asks. Her sister asked for eight months and then stopped, not unkindly. At work she is a person whose marriage ended, past tense, filed. Someone set her up with somebody last spring and she went, and it was fine, and she sat in the car outside her own house for a while afterwards.

Here is the thing she has told nobody. When she tries to picture next year, there is nothing there. Not a bad thing. Nothing. She can picture tomorrow, because tomorrow is a Tuesday and she knows what a Tuesday contains. She can picture next week if she works at it. Past that there is a wall.

People say things about the future. Her friend from church says God has got a plan, big and lovely, and she says it with her whole heart. And there is a small dishonest thing that happens in the hall afterwards, which is that she nods.

She is standing in the hall now with her coat half off, in front of the middle photograph, not really looking at it, just stopped.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Somebody keeps describing a future to you and there is nothing on the wall when you try to look at it yourself.

The word first, and it is not a preview

Before anything is offered to you here, let me be plain about the word over this page, because two years of people saying warm things has probably made you cautious and it should have.

Abundance is not money and it is not a picture of next year. It is not a described future, not a new life sketched out for you by somebody who means well, not a plan with contents you can inspect. It means fullness of life, and that is all it means here, and it does not come with a preview.

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

The noun is life. Abundantly says how much of it. Not how far ahead you can see, and not how detailed the vision is. A woman standing in a hall with her coat half off, unable to picture March, is inside that sentence exactly as she is.

You have that fullness in a hall you walk past forty times a day, and that is not something I am saying to fill a silence. It is written in John 10 and spoken by a Shepherd about His own, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a person who has run out of pictures, which is a place words do not usually reach.

Read who does the knowing

Here is the verse that gets quoted at you, and almost always inflated, so let me read it exactly as it stands.

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.Jeremiah 29:11

Read the subject of the sentence. I know. He does. It does not say you will be shown the thoughts. It does not say a picture is issued to you, or that the ability to imagine it is part of the arrangement. The knowing is entirely on His side of the verse, and that is not a disappointment hidden in the text. That is the whole comfort of it.

And read who it was written to. It was written to people already carried off to Babylon, with a long exile still in front of them, told in the same letter to build houses and plant gardens where they were. It is not a verse about a short cut. It is a letter to people who could not see the end of anything, from the One who could.

You are held inside a knowing that is not yours to do, and I am not softening the verse to say that, I am reading it. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a resting place rather than a frustration, because on paper it can read like being kept in the dark, and in the room it does not feel like that at all.

Nobody is asking you to imagine it

So here is what I am not going to do. I am not going to describe your next year to you. Not the shape of it, not who is in it, not what the hall looks like. I have no idea and neither does anybody else who has said it warmly to you in a kitchen, and a described future handed to a person who cannot see one is a weight, not a gift.

And here is the other thing. Nobody here needs you to have hope as a feeling. That is worth saying flatly, because the word gets used as though it were an emotion you generate on demand and are failing to. It is not. The future is not being kept by your capacity to picture it, and it never was, and on the days when there is nothing on the wall at all that changes precisely nothing about who is holding it.

You have a future that is kept rather than pictured, and the keeping is His work, and that is the plain reading of Jeremiah 29 rather than a nice thought about it. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person steady in the not knowing rather than the one who supplies a slideshow.

So what is left to do. Tomorrow. That is genuinely all, and it is not a reduced version of something better. Tomorrow is a Tuesday and you know what a Tuesday contains, and going into a Tuesday you can actually see is not a failure of vision, it is the honest size of what you have been given today.

You have not fallen behind anybody by having nothing on the wall, and there is no schedule written anywhere in Scripture for how quickly a person recovers a picture of anything. The Holy Spirit does not measure you against the woman from church who can see it all clearly and says so warmly in your kitchen.