How Long Is In The Book

Her friend's son was nineteen and it has been fourteen months.

There is nothing to say about it that has not been said badly to that family already. She was there for all of it. She did the food. She sat in the hospital and then she sat in the house and then she sat in the house when everybody else had gone back to work.

She is not the mother. She wants that clear, because the mother's version of this is not hers to describe and she would never take it.

But she has something she cannot put down, and it is not grief exactly.

It is fury.

Not at the mother, not at the hospital, not at anybody in that family. At God, and she can say that in her own kitchen at eleven at night and she cannot say it anywhere else.

Because she tried. Twice.

The first time was to a woman she has known for twenty years, who said something gentle about mystery and put a hand on her arm, and the second time was to a man who said, and he meant it kindly, that she should be careful how she says that.

Careful how you say it.

So now she says it into a sink at eleven at night. Fourteen months of it, in words that would empty a room, and every single morning she gets up and does the next thing, and she has not missed a single one of that family's Sundays.

Nobody edited it before it went in

Let me deal with the man who told you to be careful, because you have been half obeying him for fourteen months.

He was not cruel. He was frightened. A woman saying that out loud is a woman standing where he has never let himself stand, and the instruction was about his own footing and not about your language.

You took it as correction. It was a flinch.

Now hear this and take it as already settled rather than as permission: the words you use into that sink are the words the book itself uses, and nobody sanded them down before they were bound in. That is not my sympathy talking, it is what stands written in the thirteenth psalm, and the same Holy Spirit who has kept you at that family's Sundays for fourteen months is standing at that counter with you.

Read the opening. Count them.

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?Psalm 13:1-2

How long. How long. How long. Three in two verses, and a fourth before the psalm turns.

That is not reverent phrasing. Will you forget me forever is an accusation with a question mark on the end of it, and it is aimed directly at God, by name, in a document that was kept, copied, sung in public worship and handed down for three thousand years.

Nobody edited it. There is no softer version filed alongside. Whoever assembled that collection had every opportunity to leave this one out and put it in instead, at number thirteen, near the front.

So take this now rather than after the fury dies down: your anger is not evidence that something has gone wrong in you, because the written word carries an unedited accusation aimed at God and preserved it for public use, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept you turning up on Sundays for fourteen months while you were furious.

And the guard, because there is a false comfort here and I am not going to hand it over.

Nothing here promises you an answer. That psalm does not receive one either: the writer turns to trust at the end without ever being told why, and if I told you that fourteen more months would produce the reason I would be lying to you and you would know it by the second sentence.

What is written simply refuses to make the honest complaint into a fault, and the Holy Spirit is the one who was groaning with what has no words long before you started saying it into a sink.