Sixty Years Of His Things And One Of Me

There are two of everything.

Two chairs at that table and one of them has not been sat in since March. Two cups that were the everyday ones. Two coats on two hooks, and the second hook has been empty for seven months and you have not moved anything onto it.

Sixty years of a house furnished for two people, and one person living in it.

And what nobody who visits understands is that it is not the big things. It is the quantity of small ordinary objects that assume a second person, all through the house, in every room, continuously.

You put the kettle on and you fill it too high. Every time. Sixty years of filling it for two.

And here is what has happened lately, which is why I am writing this.

You have started to be careful about how you describe it. When people ask, you say something about being all right, and about how lucky you were to have sixty years, and both of those are true.

What you do not say is that the house is empty. You have not said that sentence to anybody, because it sounds like ingratitude for the sixty years, and you would rather carry it than sound ungrateful.

Let me deal with that, because there is a woman in scripture who says exactly that sentence and nobody corrects her.

I went out full and I came home again

There is a moment at the end of Ruth chapter one where Naomi says something out loud that most people would edit.

I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty. (Ruth 1:21, King James Version)

Empty. She uses that word about her own life, out loud, in public, on the road into town.

And notice what the book does with it. It records it. It does not soften it, it does not have anybody correct her, and the very next chapter simply carries on with her in it.

You are allowed to say out loud that it is empty, and saying it has never once been ingratitude. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who fills the kettle too high every morning, and Ruth 1:21 puts that word in a woman's mouth and leaves it standing.

And look at the first half of the sentence, which is the part people miss.

I went out full. She is not denying the fullness. She is saying both things in one breath, that it was full and that it is empty, and the second does not cancel the first.

You have both halves of a true sentence, and the second half has never once been a denial of the first. The written word lets a woman name her fullness and her emptiness in the same line, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman who has been carefully saying only one of them for seven months.

The cost of only saying the grateful half

Let me say what the careful version has cost, because it is not small.

Every conversation about it has been slightly untrue. Not a lie. A partial statement, given because the full one seemed rude to the sixty years, and delivered to people who genuinely wanted an answer.

So nobody in your life knows. Not one person has heard the sentence about the house being empty, which means you have been alone with it in a way that you did not have to be.

You have been alone with something for seven months, and it has never once been a thing that required carrying alone. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who has been managing everybody's comfort including her own, and Ruth 1:21 has a woman say the hard half in front of a whole town.

And there is something worth naming about the gratitude itself.

Sixty years was an enormous gift and you know it and you have never once been unaware of it. Gratitude for the sixty and grief for the one who is gone are not competing claims. They are the same fact looked at from two sides, and the bigger the first one is, the bigger the second one has to be.

You have a grief exactly the size of the gift, and the size of it has never once been a failure to be thankful. The written word holds the fullness and the emptiness in one sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has been keeping half of her own life quiet.

One door, and everything stays

So here is today, and it is small and nothing moves.

Open a door. The wardrobe, the drawer, the room. Open it, look, close it again.

You are opening one thing and deciding nothing, and looking has never once obliged anybody to start. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman with her hand on a wardrobe door, and Ruth 1:21 records a plain sentence and does not act on it.

And if there is somebody you could say the sentence to, say it.

Not a conversation. One sentence: the house is empty. Nobody has to respond to it well and it does not need to be understood. It only needs to exist outside your own head, which it has not done in seven months.

You are able to say one true sentence out loud, and it has never once needed a good response to be worth saying. The written word lets a woman say empty in public and carries straight on, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a woman saying something she has been carrying alone.