The Shears Are Still Rolled Up

The case is rolled up on the second shelf and she has not opened it.

Three weeks. Everybody still knows. That is what three weeks is: the messages are still coming, the flowers on the side are still alive, and her sister rings every night at half seven whether or not there is anything to say.

Thirty years of hands. She could cut a bob on a woman who would not sit still, talking the whole time, without looking twice. She could do a color correction on a Saturday with the shop full and the phone going. Her right hand now does a thing when she reaches, a slow drift about an inch off where she sent it, and the consultant used words she has written down on the back of an envelope so she can look them up.

The chair is still in the garage. The mirror. The trolley with the little drawers, and in the second drawer down, the good shears, the ones she saved a year and a half for and had sharpened by a man in another town who did them properly.

This morning is Sunday. The service is on the laptop because she cannot yet manage the doorway and the how are you. They are singing a song she has sung for years, one about lifting hands, and she gets to the second line and her mouth simply stops.

She is not angry. That would be simpler. She just cannot make any of it come out, because every word of it would be a lie in her mouth this morning, and she has never once lied to God and does not intend to start on a Sunday in a kitchen.

So she stands there with the laptop going and the cupboard door shut and says nothing at all, and then she puts the kettle on to have something to do with her hands.

Maybe that is where you are. Not faithless. Not in rebellion. Standing with your mouth shut because the only honest thing available is heavy, and somewhere along the line you were taught that heavy is not what you bring.

The word on the sign, before anything else

There is a word over the door of this site and I want to define it before I offer you anything under it, because the last thing a woman three weeks in needs is another large promise she cannot check.

Abundance is never a payment and it is never a compensation for what a body has stopped doing. In John 10 Jesus says He came so that His own would have life and have it to the full, and life is the noun. Fullness of life. Not a replacement pair of hands and not a trade.

You have that fullness this morning with the cupboard door shut, and it is not a consolation for the shears. It is written in John 10 by the Shepherd Himself, and the Holy Spirit carries a line like that into a woman who cannot get through the second verse of a song.

And it does not steady a hand. I would rather say that plainly here than have you find the gap yourself three paragraphs later.

Heavy is not the same as unbelief

Somewhere along the way a great many of us picked up the idea that worship is a performance of a particular emotional state, and that arriving without the state is arriving in the wrong clothes. It is a quiet, respectable idea and it has closed more mouths than open rebellion ever did.

Open the Psalms anywhere. The book God gave His people for singing contains a psalm that ends in darkness, a psalm that says my tears have been my food day and night, a psalm that asks God why He stands far off. None of those got edited out for being unhelpful. They are in the hymn book. They are what the hymn book is made of.

You are not disqualified from worship by having nothing cheerful in your mouth. Psalm 62 says pour out your heart before Him, and the pouring is the worship rather than the thing to be fixed before worshipping, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries what is actually in a chest rather than a tidied version of it.

Notice what that psalm does not say. It does not say pour out an edited version. It does not say wait until the contents improve. It says pour it out, before Him, and then it gives the reason: God is a refuge for us. The reason for honesty is not that honesty is brave. The reason is that the One being poured out to is a refuge, and nothing needs holding back from a refuge.

And it matters that this is a psalm and not advice. A psalm was written to be sung by a congregation, out loud, together, which means the honest heavy line was always intended as a public sentence and never as a private failure. Somebody put it in the book so that a person who could only say that would still have something to sing. Whoever compiled the hymn book was thinking about a woman standing in a kitchen on a Sunday morning long before she was born.

You were given a garment of praise and it was not issued on condition of feeling light. Isaiah 61 hands it to people who are mourning, in the same breath as the ashes, and His Spirit is the one who puts it on a person rather than asking them to perform it.

As short as it needs to be

So here is what a person actually says on a Sunday in a kitchen. Something true, and true is the only requirement there is. God is good and I cannot feel it. Or: Lord, You are still God and I have nothing else today. You are worshipping when you say that, and Psalm 62 calls it pouring out the heart before Him rather than something less than praise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives what is honestly said.

Short is allowed. Five or six words is allowed. The length of a true sentence is set by how much of it stays true, and if only a handful of words survive that test this morning, then a handful of words is the whole offering and it is not a small one.

You have not been asked for gratitude about the hands. Nowhere does Scripture require a person to be thankful for a loss, and nothing written puts that on a mourner, and the Holy Spirit does not go looking for it in a kitchen on a Sunday morning.

There is a kind of worship that only exists in a room like this one, and nobody chooses it. It is the worship of a person who will not lie to God, which is a rarer and costlier thing than the singing that comes easily, and it is very often the only thing standing between a grieving person and total silence.