Four Years And Still Down Here

She has a good life on paper and the paper is not lying.

She works, she is liked, she has a friend she has known since school and a small flat she keeps well and a habit of swimming on Wednesdays. If you met her you would think: there is somebody who is fine.

And four years ago something happened, and she has never said it out loud to one living person.

It is not a shameful thing. That is what she cannot explain even to herself. There is no reason she could not say it. She simply did not say it in the first week, because in the first week she was managing, and then she did not say it in the first month, and after about six months there was a threshold in front of the sentence that got higher every time she did not cross it.

Four years on, saying it would now require an explanation of why she had not said it for four years, and that has sealed the whole thing shut.

She still prays. She prays about other people, in detail, faithfully.

And somewhere in the second year she stopped expecting to be met, and the odd thing is how peaceful that was. It was a relief. Wanting to be met had been the sore part.

If you have gone quiet in a way that works, you know exactly what I mean.

What is true on the fourth year

Let me say first what this page will not do. I do not know what happened to you and I am not going to guess, and nothing here depends on you telling anybody today. There is no threshold on this page.

What can be said is one thing about the mornings.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22

Look at where that sentence comes from, because it matters enormously and almost nobody notices. It is in the middle of Lamentations, which is a book about a catastrophe, written by a man who is not being told why. Twenty verses earlier he says God has broken his teeth with gravel stones. He is not in a good mood and he is not pretending.

And in the middle of that he says the mercies are new every morning.

He is not saying the thing has resolved. He is saying that something arrived this morning that was not there yesterday, and that it will arrive again, whether or not he can feel it or explain it.

You have had four years of mornings and every one of them arrived new, and none of them required you to have said anything. That is not my comfort. It is written in Lamentations 3:22, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

So the silence has not put you outside anything. You have been kept every day of the four years, and the keeping never once waited for you to name it. The word settled that before whatever happened happened, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

Stopping expecting is not the same as peace

Here is the thing to name gently, because you named part of it yourself and then filed it as good news.

You said the relief came when you stopped expecting to be met. That is true and it is real relief, and it is also what a person feels when they stop pulling at a door that will not open. The pulling was the sore part. Stopping hurts less.

But a closed door with somebody who has stopped pulling at it is still a closed door, and the reason nobody has come through it is not that they refused. It is that nobody knows it is there.

I want to be careful here. Nothing on this page is telling you that you must tell somebody today, or that four years of silence was a mistake, or that you have done this badly. You have not done it badly. You have kept a life going, well, for four years, while carrying a thing alone, and that is not nothing.

But it is worth knowing what is actually true rather than what the quiet has taught you. The quiet has taught you that you are not met. What is written is that mercy arrives every morning regardless.

You have permission to want to be met again, and the wanting is not a weakness you had grown out of. Lamentations has a man in a catastrophe naming a mercy he cannot feel; His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to say a true sentence four years late.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and it can be a text if a voice is too much. If any part of this involves somebody harming you, nothing here is asking you to absorb that.