I Should Have Got It in Writing

There is one good chair in the kitchen and the rest do not match.

The good one is walnut with a worn spindle back, and it came out of the other house in the back of a borrowed van along with a box of photographs, a sewing basket, and a dish drainer. The others came from a curb, a church rummage table, and a place that sells them three for the price of two. She sits in the walnut one every morning at ten minutes to five with the light off and a cup of coffee going cold in her hand, because that is when she has always been awake, and twenty years of being awake at that hour does not undo itself just because there is nobody to get up for.

The apartment is clean. It is small and it is clean and the window over the sink faces a parking lot and a dumpster enclosure and, above that, a fair amount of sky. She has made it nice. People say so.

She nursed him fourteen months in the front room of the other house. She learned to do the shots. She learned which floorboard woke him and how to get past it in the dark. At the end she was the one who told the hospice nurse it was time to call people, because she knew before the machine did.

Eleven days after the funeral, his sister came by with a folder. She was polite about it. Everyone was polite. The house had never come out of his mother's name, and there was a conversation, and there were words like understand and difficult and best for everybody, and it was over in under an hour, and the following month there was a van.

And what she thinks about, sitting in the walnut chair at ten minutes to five, is not his sister. It is a sentence. He had said it a hundred times, on the porch, in the truck, at that very kitchen table. This place is yours, honey. You will never have to worry. And she had believed him, because you believe a man who has never once lied to you, and she never asked him to write it down, and now she is sixty-eight years old and there is a sentence that runs in her head at ten minutes to five, every morning, for twenty years.

I should have got it in writing.

You have your own version and your own hour of the morning. Maybe it was a house, maybe it was a business, maybe it was a handshake at a kitchen table, maybe it was the years you gave to somebody on the strength of what they said. And underneath it you have a sentence that starts with I should have, and that sentence has been billing you interest every day since. You are living under a verdict that a hurt woman handed down on herself in a room with nobody else in it. It is written in Psalm 68:6 that God sets the solitary in families, He does the setting Himself, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in that kitchen at ten minutes to five every morning for twenty years and has never once agreed with the sentence you keep passing.

Whose doing it actually was

Take the sentence apart, because you have never once looked at it in daylight.

I should have got it in writing. Say it slowly and hear what it is doing. It moves the whole thing onto you. It takes a decision that other people made, in a room, on a day, after a funeral, and it turns it into a clerical failure of yours. It says the cause of your last twenty years is a piece of paper you did not think of at thirty-nine while you were learning to do somebody's shots.

That is not true and I am going to say so plainly. You did not do this. A trusting woman in a marriage taking her husband at his word is not a woman being careless. That is what a marriage is. The failure, if we are naming failures, was not in the room where you believed him.

And I am not going to name a course of action for you either. Not a letter, not a lawyer, not a conversation you rehearse in the truck. This page has nothing to say about what ought to happen to anybody, because that account is not yours to work out and it never was.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.Psalm 68:6

Read the verbs again. Setteth. Bringeth out. Both of them belong to God and neither of them is a courtroom. He is not described here as the one who reverses a document. He is described as the one who takes a person who is alone and puts her somewhere, and the one who walks a person out of what she has been chained to.

You have a God whose named work is setting solitary people into families, and that is His doing and not a thing you have to arrange. Psalm 68:6 is where it is written, in a verb with God as its subject, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that setting, quietly, in ordinary rooms, generally before the person notices it has started.

He does not hand back the deed

Now the honest part, and it does not get softened at the end.

Restored does not mean returned. God is not going to walk into that room eleven days after a funeral and undo it. The house is not coming to you and the twenty years are not being credited back to your account. If somebody has told you the story is not finished until the front room is yours again, they have made God's faithfulness depend on an outcome He never promised you, and that is a heavy thing to carry on top of everything else you are carrying.

What He does is different, and it is not smaller. Replaced would mean another house and another front room and the same woman, still awake at ten minutes to five, still under the same verdict. Restored means the woman in the walnut chair comes out from under it.

You are not being handed a substitute for what was taken, and you are not being asked to call a substitute even. The word says God brings out those who are bound, and bound is the right word for a sentence you have been serving in your own kitchen since you were forty, and it is the same Spirit who did the bringing out in that psalm who is doing it in you.

And nobody here is going to tell you to forgive anybody today. That is between you and God, in His time, and it is not the toll you pay to get anything on this page. Your anger about that folder is not a spiritual defect. It is the correct response to being handled politely out of your own front room, and the Lord has never once asked you to pretend otherwise.