Forty Years Of Things In One Room

Four boxes high and about eleven deep.

You could stand in the doorway and date them by the tape and the handwriting. There is your husband's block capitals on the ones from the seventies. There is your own from a move in the nineties. There are three at the back in a hand you do not recognize, which are almost certainly your mother's.

Forty three years in one upstairs room.

And when the family talk about it, which they do gently and about twice a year, the word they reach for is backlog. Nobody says it unkindly. They say it because in their heads that room is a job somebody is eventually going to have to do.

You have never corrected them.

But it is not a backlog. A backlog is work that should have been done and was not. That room is not undone work. It is what forty three years of a life leaves behind when the life was actually lived in one place.

And there is a difference between a pile of undone work and a record, and it is the whole difference in how a person feels walking past a door.

Remember all the way He led you

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy given to people at the end of a very long stretch.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness. (Deuteronomy 8:2, King James Version)

Remember all the way. Not the destination. The way, which is the whole of it, including the ordinary years in the middle that nobody would have chosen to keep.

Forty years, treated as a single thing worth going back over deliberately, by people who had every reason to want to put it behind them.

You are standing in the record of a whole way, and forty years has never once been a backlog. Deuteronomy 8:2 commands a deliberate remembering of a long stretch, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who can date her own boxes by the handwriting.

And notice what makes remembering possible.

It requires that things be retained. A generation that had kept nothing could not have obeyed that instruction, and the whole book is full of stones and jars and written things kept precisely so that a long way could be gone back over.

You have kept the material that remembering requires, and keeping it has never once been the same as failing to deal with it. The written word commands a going back over the whole way, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman who has never corrected her own family about a word.

Backlog is the wrong word

Let me be precise about the two words, because the family is not being unkind and is also wrong.

A backlog implies a schedule that was missed. It assumes those boxes were supposed to have been processed by now and were not, which assumes somebody set a date, which nobody did.

Nobody ever said: by nineteen ninety four these should be gone. There was no plan. There is no arrears.

You are not behind on anything, and no schedule has ever once existed for that room. Deuteronomy 8:2 asks for the whole forty years to be remembered rather than cleared, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land for a woman who has been quietly accepting a word that does not fit.

And here is what the wrong word has cost.

It has made a room full of her mother's handwriting into a task on somebody's list. And when you walk past it, you do not feel forty three years of a life, you feel a job you have not done, and that is a theft that nobody intended and nobody noticed.

You have been robbed of a record and handed a chore, and it has never once actually been a chore. The written word treats a long stretch as a thing to be gone back over with attention, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has been walking past her own life and calling it arrears.

Two minutes in the record

So here is today, and it is short and nothing is processed.

Walk into the room. Stay for two minutes. Leave without moving anything.

You are standing in it rather than working at it, and standing in it has never once been the wrong way to be in that room. Deuteronomy 8:2 asks for remembering and not for clearing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman standing among four decades of her own handwriting.

And while you are in there, do the thing the verse asks.

Not all of it. Pick one box you can date and remember the year it came from. That is the instruction in Deuteronomy, performed at the scale of two minutes, and it is the exact opposite of processing.

You are doing what the verse actually asks, and remembering has never once been the same as sorting. The written word commands the going back over the way, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land for a woman standing still in a room and thinking about nineteen eighty one.