Fourteen Years Of Everything We Wore

It is on the driveway waiting to be collected.

And you went out to move the recycling and stopped, and you have been standing beside it for about four minutes now, and this is not what you expected to be doing this morning.

Because it is metal. It has a dent in the side from the time it was moved. It is a manufactured object and it is finished and somebody is coming at eleven.

And yet.

Fourteen years. Every uniform. Every set of sheets from the year everybody had that thing. The clothes somebody wore to a funeral, and the ones they wore to a wedding four months later, and every single ordinary Tuesday in between.

That is what is on the driveway. Not a machine. Fourteen years of a family's clothes, and that number keeps arriving with a weight that seems out of proportion, and it is being quietly resisted because it feels ridiculous to mind.

You are standing beside something that served this house and not being sentimental about metal, and noticing what carried a family has never once been a foolish thing to do.

Thy clothes are not waxen old upon thee

There is a moment where God points out something extremely ordinary that people had not noticed for forty years.

And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot. (Deuteronomy 29:5, King James Version)

Your clothes are not waxen old upon you.

Of all the things that could have been chosen. Not the sea, not the mountain, not the fire on the hill. Clothes and shoes, the two most ordinary possessions a person has, and the thing pointed out is that they held up.

That is a remarkable choice of evidence, and it says something about what gets noticed and what does not.

You are looking at exactly the kind of thing that verse points at, and an ordinary object that held up for years has never once been beneath the notice of God. The Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing on a driveway at half past ten, and Deuteronomy 29:5 chooses clothes and shoes as its example.

And notice when it gets said. At the end. Forty years in, looking back.

Nobody was noticing at the time. That is the whole reason it has to be pointed out. Forty years of sandals holding together, one day at a time, entirely unremarked, and the noticing only happens at the end when somebody says look at that.

You are doing the noticing that the verse had to be spoken to prompt, and a thing that served without ever being remarked on has never once been a thing that deserved to go unnoticed. The written word has God pointing out what went unobserved for forty years, and the Spirit of God is the one who stops a woman on a driveway to look.

And the noticing in that verse is not made into a lesson.

He does not say: and therefore expect more. He does not turn it into a principle about the future or a promise about the next forty years. He points at what happened and lets it stand there.

You are permitted to notice something without extracting anything from it, and an observation about what served has never once needed to become a lesson about what comes next. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a moment on a driveway be exactly what it is, and Deuteronomy 29:5 points and stops.

Counting it in occasions

Something practical, and it is a different way of counting.

Fourteen years is an abstraction. Nobody can feel fourteen years. It is a number and numbers slide off.

Occasions do not. Count it in occasions instead and something happens that the number could not do.

The uniform in the first week of every September. The sheets the week your mother stayed. The suit. The christening thing. The whole of the year somebody was ill and the washing was constant and nobody slept.

You have been trying to feel a number instead of remembering a list, and fourteen years counted in occasions has never once been the same as fourteen years counted in years. The written word points at clothes and shoes rather than at a span of time, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a list out of an abstraction.

Now the second thing, and it is about the resistance.

The resistance says: it is a machine, and minding about a machine is silly, and a sensible woman does not stand on a driveway with her hand on a lid.

But nobody is grieving metal. What is actually being noticed is fourteen years of a family, and the machine is where those years happen to be stored, the way a photograph is not paper and a house is not bricks.

You are noticing a family rather than mourning an appliance, and a thing that holds a stretch of years has never once been the same as the years it holds. The Holy Spirit is the one who knows which of the two is being seen, and Deuteronomy 29:5 points at shoes and means forty years of being carried.

So say it out loud. That is the whole assignment and it takes eleven seconds.

Thank you for fourteen years. Name one thing, out loud, on the driveway, before the truck comes.

You have eleven seconds and two sentences standing between you and a thing properly noticed, and a short thank you said beside an old machine has never once been too small a thing to have done. The Holy Spirit is the one on the driveway while it gets said, and Deuteronomy 29:5 points at the ordinary item and lets it stand.