You Do Not Have To Picture It

The card is in the drawer under the tea towels and it has been written since October.

She wrote it at this table with the good pen. Not much in it, because much would have been a mistake. Happy birthday, thinking of you, love Mum. She got as far as the hall with it twice. It is a nice card, a heron on the front, and she is no longer sure whether the not sending was fear or manners.

It is a Sunday afternoon in the middle of February. On the fridge there is a photograph somebody else took and somebody else sent, of two children she has not met. The older one has her father's exact chin. She looks at it while the kettle goes and she has stopped pretending that she does not.

Five months. It did not end in a row, which is the part other people find hardest to follow. There was no scene and there is nothing to point at. It thinned. The calls got shorter, and then monthly, and then there was a message in September that was perfectly polite, and since then nothing except a card at Christmas with two names inside it in somebody else's handwriting.

Here is what five months is. It is when she has stopped telling anybody at church, because there are only so many times a woman can say the same sentence to the same kind faces. Her friend Margaret asked every week until about November and does not ask now, and that is not coldness, that is Margaret not wanting to poke at it. It is cooking for four out of thirty years of habit and putting three portions in the freezer.

And this is the part she cannot say out loud anywhere. It is not the missing them. She can carry the missing them. It is that when she tries to think about next year, or Christmas, or being seventy, there is nothing there. Not a bad picture. No picture at all. She used to be able to see her life out in front of her, and there is nothing there now, and a woman with nothing in front of her does not know what she is supposed to be hoping for.

Somebody gave her a verse in January about God knowing the plans He has for her. She has read it forty times. It is true and it did not help, because a plan a person cannot see is not a thing they can hold on a Sunday afternoon in February.

Maybe that is where you are. Not needing to be told there is a future. Needing something to hold that is not a description of one.

The word, before anything gets promised with it

There is a word on the front of this site and it sounds like a payout, so I will pin it down before anything is offered underneath it.

Abundance is not money, and it is not a full house at Christmas either. It is not the calls starting again, it is not a photograph taken by her instead of by somebody else, and nothing on this page is a technique for getting a family back. The word means fullness of life. That is what John 10 says: the Shepherd came so that His own would have life and have it over the brim, and life is what is in the sentence.

I want to be careful about it here, because in this particular grief the ambiguous word is not only money. It is the future itself, and a page that hints at what next year holds is doing the same trick in a different currency.

You have that fullness now, at the fridge, on a Sunday in February, with a card in a drawer and nothing at all out in front of you. Not once the phone rings. Now. That is not my optimism about anybody's family, it is what is written in John 10, and the Holy Spirit carries a promise like that into a kitchen where somebody has stopped being able to picture anything.

Nobody here is handing you a technique

Let me clear something out of the way, because the internet is full of it and it does harm in a house like this one.

I have nothing for you about how to get them back. No message to send, no approach, no set of words that opens a door, no prayer worded the right way that moves another person's will. Their will is theirs, God does not override it, and any page that hands a mother a method is selling her a lever that does not exist and setting her up to blame herself when it does not work.

And I will not aim a declaration at a grown man or woman either. We speak to fear, to silence and to distance, and we bless the people. That is not weakness. It is the difference between prayer and manipulation, and every honest minister knows exactly where that line runs.

You have not failed at this, and nothing in the word of God makes one person responsible for another adult's silence, and the Holy Spirit is not withholding anything from a woman on the grounds that she did not word something correctly.

Your times are in His hand, and He has not described them

Here is the sentence I want to put in your hands instead, and it is short.

My times are in your hand.Psalm 31:15

Read what it gives and read what it withholds. It gives the hand. It does not give a description of what is in the hand, and David does not ask for one. He is being hunted at the time and he has no picture at all of how any of it ends, and what he says is not I can see it now. It is my times are in Your hand.

That is the exact shape of what is on offer here. Not a preview. A grip. A future that is held rather than a future that is displayed, and the difference between those two is the whole of the comfort, because a described future can turn out wrong and a held one cannot.

You are held by the hand your times are in, and that is written down in Psalm 31 rather than being my hope for anybody, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a written line like that go in where the imagination has stopped working.

Hope is not a feeling you have to produce

One more thing, because this is where a woman in that kitchen gets quietly condemned by well meaning people.

Hope in Scripture is not optimism. It is not the ability to picture something good. It is confidence in a Person, which is exactly why it survives in somebody with no picture at all, and why it can be perfectly real in a woman who feels nothing whatsoever on a Sunday afternoon.

So if there is nothing out in front of you tonight, that is not unbelief and it is not a spiritual failure. It is what five months of silence does to the part of a person that imagines, and God is not standing over that with His arms folded.

You were held through every one of those five months, including the evenings nobody knows anything about, and the word of God says His hand is under the ones who can see nothing exactly as it is under the ones who can, and His Spirit has been the one keeping a woman upright at a kettle who could not have told you what was keeping her upright.