Hours Left and Eleven Years of Not Speaking

Your cousin rang at half past eleven this morning and said it plainly, which you were grateful for and did not say so.

You have been in this corridor for about forty minutes. You have not gone in.

Eleven years. Not a feud, exactly. There was one conversation, in a kitchen, in the September, and neither of you said anything unforgivable, and both of you said enough. And then a fortnight went by, and then a month, and then it became a thing that was true rather than a thing that had happened.

Christmas cards. Both ways, every year, eleven of them. Signed properly. Nothing written inside beyond the printed part and a name.

You are not here for a scene. You want that clear in your own head before you go through that door, because you have watched enough television to know what is supposed to happen in a corridor like this one, and none of it is available.

She has not been conscious since last night.

So there is no conversation. There is no explaining, no apology in either direction, no working out what actually happened in that kitchen in the September. Whatever eleven years was, it is now what it will always have been.

And you are standing in a corridor with your hand on a door frame, and the honest question in you is not what do I say to her.

It is: what is even possible in a room like that?

God is described as devising means

Stand there a minute longer. Nobody is timing you and I am not going to tell you to go in until you have something to go in with.

You are standing in front of the half of that sentence God took for Himself, and the devising was never once yours to do. That is what is written, in the same breath as the water on the ground, and the Spirit has been working that engineering since long before this afternoon in that corridor.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit will not have me pushing a woman through a door: eleven years is not undone this afternoon, and I am not going to pretend at you that it can be. There is no scene available and you were right about that in the corridor. And nobody is on trial in this article. Not your mother, who cannot answer for anything today. Not you. Not one word of this is a verdict on a conversation in a kitchen that I was not in.

Now come and look at a sentence spoken to a king about a son he had cut off, by a woman who had been sent to say it.

For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again; neither doth God respect any person: yet doth he devise means, that his banished be not expelled from him.2 Samuel 14:14

Read the first half. Water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again. That is the honest part, and it is in the Bible, and it is not softened. Some things do not go back. Some conversations are not had. Some water is on the ground.

And then, in the same sentence, without contradicting a word of it: yet doth he devise means, that his banished be not expelled from him.

Devise means. That is the language of somebody working out how to do a difficult thing. God is described as engineering routes back for people who are out, and the sentence puts that right next to the admission that the water cannot be gathered.

Both halves are true at once. That is the whole verse and it is the only honest thing anybody can hand you in that corridor.

Eleven years is water on the ground and God devises means, and Scripture puts those two facts in one sentence without making either of them less. That is not me consoling a woman outside a door. That is what is written, and what that verse holds together, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a corridor at noon.

Here is what nobody explains at a door like this one. When you speak a blessing over your mother, you are not repairing anything and you are not making a statement about eleven years. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a woman He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not need her to be conscious and He does not need the two of you to have sorted anything out.

A blessing is the one thing that can be said in that room, because it is the only sentence that does not require a reply. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, past tense, and the Spirit is the one who carries a word from heaven over a bed, and none of its weight is in a relationship that neither of you managed.

What you are not required to do

Now let me name the thing that has kept you in the corridor for forty minutes, because it is not fear and it is not coldness.

What is written offers a different purpose for a room like that, and the Spirit is not judging you for standing out here. You cannot see what the visit is for. Every model you have of a scene like this involves resolution: something said, something answered, something released. And every one of those requires two conscious people and an afternoon, and you have neither.

So the visit looks pointless, and pointless feels obscene at a deathbed, and so you have stayed in the corridor. What is written never once required a resolution, and the Spirit is not waiting for one either.

But that is only true if the purpose of going in is to fix eleven years. Take that off the table, because it was never on it, and something else becomes possible.

A blessing does not resolve. It does not require her to have said anything. It does not settle the kitchen in the September and it does not pretend the September did not happen. It goes over a person and it stops.

That is not a lesser thing than the scene you are not going to get. It is a different thing, and it is the thing that is actually available.

God has not asked you to repair a relationship this afternoon, and He has never once made a reconciliation the condition of a blessing being spoken. It is written that He devises means for the banished, which is God taking the engineering as His own work, and the same Spirit who breathed that is standing in this corridor, which is why it lands as a division of labor and not as a comfort.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you what your mother thought or thinks or would have said. I do not know and neither do you and nobody in that building does, and I am not going to hand you an invented ending. And I am not telling you that going in makes anything all right.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can be said over her that does not require eleven years to have gone differently. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a daughter saying twenty words over a woman who cannot hear her is not doing nothing in that room.