The Cardigan In The Second Drawer

The cardigan is moss green and it is in the second drawer down, folded in the tissue paper it came home from the wool shop in.

She knitted it for a baby. The baby is two now, or nearly two, going by what her cousin let slip at a funeral last autumn. She has never held him. She has never been sent a photograph. She knows his name because her cousin said it out loud in a car park and then went a bit pink and changed the subject.

It is Tuesday. The radio is on low in the kitchen, not because she is listening but because the house is very loud without it. She has hoovered the back room, which did not need it, and wiped down a windowsill that was clean.

Two years. It did not happen in a single afternoon, which is the thing she would say if anybody asked, and nobody asks. The Sunday calls at six went to every other Sunday, then to messages, then to nothing. No letter. No row on a doorstep. Just a slow thinning out, until one evening she realized she was sitting by a phone at six out of habit, like a woman waiting for a bus on a route that had been canceled.

The birthday card is still behind the clock. She wrote it in March, and she addressed it, and she has not posted it, and the corners have gone soft from being picked up and put back.

At the coffee morning last week a woman she likes very much put a hand on her arm and said, they always come back, love. She said it the way you would state a law of physics, warmly, absolutely certain, and then went to get the milk jug.

She said thank you. She went home. She stood in the bedroom with the second drawer open and the tissue paper folded back, and she did not cry, because she has mostly stopped doing that, and she put her hand flat on the wool for a minute and then she shut the drawer.

Her friend Pat used to ask about them. Pat does not ask any more, out of kindness, and the not asking is somehow worse than the asking ever was.

Maybe that is roughly where you are. Not in the loud part. In the long flat afternoon two years on, in a house where the thing that happened has stopped being news to anybody except you, and where somebody who loves you has just told you something certain and hopeful that you cannot make yourself hold.

The word on the front of this site, first

Before anything else, the word on the sign, because it sounds like money and there is every reason to be suspicious of it.

Abundance does not mean money. It does not mean your family handed back the way it used to be, and I am not letting the word sit there being vague about that while you read. In the sentence it comes out of, the noun is life. Fullness of life, right through a person, and that is the whole of the definition.

That is what the Shepherd said He came for in John 10, and He said it about people, not about circumstances, which is why it can be true in a house where absolutely nothing has moved for two years.

You are met in this house this afternoon, in the actual silence rather than in a tidied up version of it, and that is not my encouragement to you. Scripture says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit, Psalm 34 puts it in those exact words, and the Holy Spirit makes near mean near in a room where the phone has not gone.

Two years is its own weather

I want to stay in this room a while, because an article that hurries past two years has not understood what two years is.

Two years is when the sympathy has finished. It is when the people who were furious on your behalf have gone back to their own lives, which is right and proper and also very lonely. It is when the hardest hour of the week is not a birthday or a Christmas, but a Tuesday at half past two with nothing in it.

And I am not handing you a method. There is no paragraph coming about how to word a message, or what to say if they ring, or the six things that reopen a door. Other people's decisions are theirs, and I have no business telling their hearts what to do. Nothing I say to you tonight is aimed at them.

You have been sat with for two years, right the way through the part that nobody saw, and none of that waited for the situation to improve first. It is written into the promise God made never to leave and never to forsake, and it is His Spirit who has been keeping it in a kitchen on a Tuesday, at half past two, with the radio on low.

The certain, hopeful thing the woman said at the coffee morning did not land, and it did not land because it was a prediction, and a prediction is the one thing nobody can hold after two years of holding their breath. I am not going to give you another one. I do not know, and neither does she.

What being held actually is

Being held is not being lifted. That distinction matters more on this page than anywhere else on this site.

Lifted would mean out. Out of the silence, out of the Tuesday, out of the drawer with the cardigan in it. Held means somebody is in here, at your end of it, without a plan for moving you on and without a timetable in His pocket.

You were loved on the first Sunday the phone did not ring, at six o'clock, with the kettle already filled. Nobody had to tell Him about that evening afterwards. That is what is written in Scripture about the God who stays near rather than a comfort I invented for the occasion, and His Spirit is the one who carries it back into the exact evening it belongs to.

There is a thing grief does after the second year, and it is worth naming plainly. It starts to feel like a fault. You start to think you should be somewhere else with it by now, that other people manage, that a stronger woman would have made her peace with it, that there is something a bit indulgent about a drawer you keep opening.

You are not being hurried out of this by anybody who matters. There is no stage you have failed to reach and no schedule you are behind on, nothing in Scripture asks a grieving person to be further along than they actually are, and the Holy Spirit is named the Comforter before He is named anything else in a room shaped like this one.

So the fullness of life we started with is not a fuller house. It is a fuller person, in a house that is exactly as empty as it was this morning. It is being able to feel things again without them taking you off your feet. It is prayer that is not an argument. It is company that you did not have to arrange.