It Was Still Here When He Was Not

It was here when he moved in and it is still here.

That is the arithmetic and it is a strange one to be standing in front of on a Tuesday morning.

Eleven years for the marriage. Fourteen for the machine, which was second hand when it arrived and which has now outlasted the whole of it.

And it is finished now and something else is coming, and you have been fine about all of it and have made the arrangements without difficulty.

And then this morning you came in and looked at it and the whole eleven years arrived at once, in the way they do, and you stood there for a bit.

Not sadly, exactly. It is a long time ago now and there is a life since. Just that it all came, at once, in a kitchen, before eight in the morning, brought on by an appliance.

You are a man standing beside an object that outlasted something and not a man being dragged backward, and a thing that stayed longer than a marriage has never once been a comment on the man who kept the house.

Weeping may endure for a night

There is a line in the psalms that gives a hard stretch a boundary without lying about what it contains.

For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. (Psalm 30:5, King James Version)

Weeping may endure for a night.

May endure. It is permitted to. There is no instruction in that clause to have finished by now, and no suggestion that a person who still has some of it left is behind schedule.

That matters in a kitchen eleven years on, because the usual assumption is that a thing this old should not be arriving at all.

You are permitted to have some of this still arriving, and a stretch of weeping that outlasted anybody's expectation has never once been a stretch that was running late. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man standing in a kitchen before eight, and Psalm 30:5 says may endure without a deadline attached.

And notice the shape of the whole verse, because the ordering is a mercy.

In his favor is life, and then the weeping, and then the morning. The weeping sits in the middle of the sentence, held on both sides, rather than standing on its own at the end of it.

You are inside something rather than at the end of something, and a hard stretch held on both sides by a sentence has never once been the last word in it. The written word surrounds the weeping with the favor and the morning, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a man inside the whole sentence rather than inside one clause.

And joy cometh in the morning is not a promise about what any particular morning contains.

It is a statement about direction. Mornings come. Things do not stay at their night size. And the psalm makes that a property of how God has arranged time rather than a reward for handling a night well.

You are inside an arrangement where things do not stay at night size, and a morning that arrives on its own has never once been a morning a man had to earn. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings a man to the far side of a stretch without requiring anything from him, and Psalm 30:5 makes it a fact about the arrangement.

What actually arrived in the kitchen

Something practical, and it is about what came, rather than about whether it should have.

What arrived was not one feeling. It was eleven years, which contains a very large number of different things, and they arrived together because an object triggered all of them at once.

And a great many of them were good. That is the part that gets lost when a stretch gets filed under one heading.

There were ordinary years in there. There was a summer that was genuinely good. There were four or five thousand entirely unremarkable evenings, most of which were fine, and a machine in the corner running through all of them.

You have good things inside a stretch that got filed under one word, and eleven years of a life have never once been a single thing that could be labeled once. The written word puts the favor and the life in the same sentence as the weeping, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a stretch from collapsing into one word.

And here is the practical thing, and it is specific on purpose.

Thank God out loud for one ordinary year. Name the year.

Not for the marriage, which is a large and complicated thing and not what this is. For one year. The one with the garden in it, or the one before anything went wrong, or the one where the two of you painted the back room badly and laughed about it.

You are able to thank God for one year without endorsing all of them, and a single good year named out loud has never once been a lie about the years around it. The Holy Spirit is the one in the kitchen while a year gets named, and Psalm 30:5 holds the favor and the weeping in one sentence without either canceling the other.

And that is the whole exercise. One year, out loud, by name, and then breakfast.