The Card Still In The Drawer

The drawer is the one with the batteries and the fuses and the takeaway menus for places that shut years ago.

The card is at the bottom, under all that, in its cellophane. She bought it in February. She wrote it in February too, and she got the wording down to four lines after about nine attempts, and she put a stamp on it, which she now thinks was the mistake, because a stamp makes a thing look ready.

The address is the trouble. She has an address, given to her by somebody else's cousin at a funeral, and she does not know whether it is still right, and there is only one way to find out, and she has been not finding out since February.

There is a grandchild. She knows the name because a woman at church was shown a photograph and mentioned it in passing, kindly, not knowing. Four, she thinks. Possibly five now.

Six weeks since she sent the last message. It showed as read on the Tuesday and that was six weeks ago and she has not sent another one, because she has worked out that a message showing as read and going nowhere is worse than not sending it, and because she is frightened of using up whatever is left.

It is Thursday. The house is very tidy. That is what has happened to the house since it all came apart, it has got tidier and tidier, and there are four clean mugs on the drainer that nobody has drunk out of.

Somebody at church told her God gives families back. She said thank you, and she went out to the car, and she sat there and thought about it the way you press a bruise.

And what she cannot say to anybody, because of how it would sound, is that she has stopped picturing a big table with everybody round it. She used to be able to see it. Now when she reaches for that picture there is nothing there at all, and the nothing frightens her more than the quiet does.

Maybe that is where you are. Standing at a drawer with a card in your fingers and a stamp already on it, in a kitchen that is far too tidy, six weeks or six years into a silence you did not choose.

Let me be plain about the word before anything else

Abundance is not the family back around one table.

It is not the phone going, it is not everybody home at Christmas, it is not the years handed over, and it is not money either, and I am not going to leave the word open and let it fill up with the thing you most want while you read. Abundance means fullness of life. Life, and more of it than there was, in the ground under your feet.

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

That is the definition and it is the only one on offer here.

You have that this Thursday, in a tidy house with four clean mugs on the drainer, and it is not a smaller thing handed over because the real thing is unavailable. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own words, and the Holy Spirit carries it into a person who has stopped being able to picture anything good.

Six weeks, and the thing you cannot say out loud

Nothing I say brings anybody home, and I am not going to predict who walks through a door or when.

I want to be exact about that, because forecasts have been handed to you already and they cost something every time. Somebody says it will all come right, and for about two days something in you lifts, and then the phone does not go and the drop is further than it was before they said it. A prediction dressed as faith is a debt somebody else took out in your name.

So I am not going to describe your family to you. What is written in Isaiah 61 is about God and about ruined places in general, and turning it into a forecast about your daughter would be me making something up.

But look at what the verse does say, because it is not nothing.

to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord.Isaiah 61:3

Oaks. Planted. In the place where the ashes were, not somewhere else and not as a swap for what was lost. And the thing everyone misses is that an oak in that verse is a person, not a circumstance. It is what God grows in people who have been through a burning, and it says nothing whatsoever about the timetable of anybody's family.

You are the planting of the Lord, and that is a present tense sentence in Isaiah 61, not a description of somebody you might turn into on a better day. It is written down, and it is the Spirit who makes a written line take root in a woman standing at a drawer.

What is already alive in this house

Here is what I would ask you to do, and it is small and it is not a technique for getting anybody back.

Look at the ground under your feet and find one thing alive on it. Not a replacement. Not a consolation. One living thing that is going on in your life this week and would keep going on if nobody rang: a friendship that has quietly held, the fact that you still pray for them without the ache getting into it, a plant on a sill, work with your hands, somebody at church who tells you things, the mercy that you can still be pleased for other people's news. You know what yours is. You will probably want to apologize for how small it is.

Do not apologize for it. Burnt ground does not come back the way it went, it comes back in patches and it comes back low, and the first green on a slope after a fire looks like nothing at all to anybody who did not know what was there before.

You have new life going on in you already, and it does not have to match what was lost to be real. That is Isaiah 61 talking about a planting rather than a restoration, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the growing rather than you managing it.

And nobody is going to measure it for you either. Small is the honest size of new growth on a slope that has been through a fire, and at the start it is the only size it comes in.

And you are not being asked to be glad about how this ground got cleared. Nobody here is going to tell you the silence did you good. What I will say is that the God who grows things does not need permission from a situation before He does it, and Scripture never once puts that work on the strength of the person it happens in, and His Spirit is the gardener here.