Nothing Exact to Hand Her

Her daughter is twenty-three and she is home for four days and she is not all right, and they both know it, and neither of them has said so.

Wednesday night, half ten, the two of them at the kitchen table with the big light off and the one over the hob on, which is how they have always talked. Toast crumbs. A pot of tea going cold in the middle.

And out of nowhere her daughter says, not sharply, just tired: has God ever actually done anything for you? Like actually.

And she opens her mouth.

She has been a believer for thirty-one years. She could not begin to tell you what she believes in the way you would put it on a form, but she knows it the way she knows the stairs in the dark. There has been so much. Whole seasons of being carried. She can feel it right now sitting at this table, a sort of pressure behind the ribs, and if her daughter asked her whether it was real she would say yes without a flicker.

So she starts. There was a time when your dad was, when we were, I mean the year everything went, and, you know, somehow.

She stops.

She tries again. When your nan was ill there was a night, and I remember the sky was that odd yellow color, and I felt, I can't explain it, I just knew we were going to be all right, and we were.

Her daughter waits, properly, the way a kind person waits.

And she has nothing else. She cannot remember the year. She cannot remember what came in the post or who rang or what the sum was or what the doctor said on the second visit. She remembers the yellow sky. She remembers the smell of the corridor. She remembers, with total precision, exactly how it felt to come out of that fortnight, and she cannot produce one solid object.

Her daughter says, that's nice, Mum. And means it kindly. And takes her mug to the sink and goes up.

She sits there for a while with the light over the hob and the cold pot.

Thirty-one years. A whole life of it. And she has just discovered, at half ten on a Wednesday, that she cannot hand any of it to the person she most wants to hand it to.

And a thought comes that is not true and is very hard to argue with at that hour: maybe there is nothing to hand over. Maybe it has all just been weather.

A king who could not sleep, and a book somebody had kept

There is a night in the book of Esther that turns a whole nation, and it turns on the most boring object in the palace.

On that night could not the king sleep, and he commanded to bring the book of records of the chronicles; and they were read before the king.Esther 6:1

A man cannot sleep. He sends for the ledger. Not a prophet, not a priest, not a sign in the sky. The ledger, the running record of who did what, kept by a clerk because keeping it was the clerk's job.

And in it there is a line about a man at a gate who once overheard two doorkeepers plotting and reported it. That is all. It was not dramatic when it happened. Nobody wept. Nobody testified. Somebody wrote down four or five words and the ink dried and the page was turned and years went by.

And on one sleepless night, that line got read out loud, and everything after it in the story runs through it.

You are not a woman with nothing to hand over, you are a woman with an unwritten record, and those are entirely different problems. I am not saying that to be gentle with you: Esther 6:1 shows God working through a page somebody bothered to keep, and the Holy Spirit is the One who brings a kept line back up at the hour it is needed. The keeping is what was missing. Never the material.

The entry was never supposed to be dramatic

Look again at what was actually in that chronicle. A man overheard something and mentioned it. On the day, it was admin.

This is the thing that keeps people from writing anything down at all: they are waiting to have something worth writing. They have decided, without deciding, that a record is for headlines, and their life has not produced headlines, and so the page stays empty and thirty-one years go by.

Look at what Joshua was told to take out of the river. Twelve stones. Ordinary river stones, wet, no shape to them, chosen because they were where the feet had stood. God's memorial to the most spectacular thing He had done that decade was a heap of rocks a child would ask about.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?Joshua 4:6

Read who the memorial was for. The children. It was built so that a question could be answered later by somebody who was not there.

Right now, as you read, you have thirty-one years of real material, and it is already yours whether or not one line of it is on paper. That is written into how God works with memory, and His Spirit is the One who lifts the small things back into view, which is why the first thing that surfaces when you pick up a pen is usually the true one.

A feeling does not survive the handover, and that is not your fault

Here is what happened at that table, and there is no shame anywhere in it.

You were trying to hand your daughter a feeling. It cannot be done. Feelings are not transferable objects; they are what happens inside one person's body, and the moment you reach for one to give away it turns into the sentence you know so well: I can't explain it, but. Notice that Scripture hands things over in written lines rather than in atmospheres, and that the Holy Spirit works with what somebody wrote down.

Your memory is not defective. It is a normal human memory, doing the normal human thing, which is to keep the weather and lose the date. The yellow sky is a real memory. It is simply not a portable one.

What is portable is small, plain, and dated. Six words on a slip of paper will cross a table. A feeling from 1998 will not.

You have never been the poor relation in this family for remembering it that way, and Christ is the one who settles that, not your recall. Scripture says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, in Psalm 103:14, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you tonight with a mark scheme. He is putting a pencil in your hand.