The First Finished Thing In A Long Time

Somebody asked you a question at a table recently and you could not answer it.

They asked what you had got done lately. An ordinary question, warmly meant, the kind of thing people ask.

And you went hunting. You could feel yourself hunting, in real time, across a whole year, for something to say. And what came out was something about work, because work had a thing in it, and then you changed the subject.

That hunt is the thing I want to talk about. Not the answer. The hunting.

Because a year is a long time and you have not been idle in it. You have got through it, and getting through a year like that one takes a great deal, and none of it is the kind of thing that produces an answer at a table.

So you sat there with a whole year in your hands and nothing to hold up.

That is not a small experience and I am not going to pretend it is. It was not embarrassment. It was something closer to fright, and you have not gone back to it since.

Let me go back to it with you, gently, because there is something in there that is not true.

Then was our mouth filled with laughing

There is a psalm that begins after something has already changed, and it is worth noticing where it starts.

When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughing. (Psalm 126:1-2, King James Version)

Then. The laughing comes after a turning, and the turning is not something the people in the psalm did.

They were like them that dream, which is what it feels like when something moves that you had stopped expecting to move. They did not engineer it and the psalm does not credit them with it. They noticed it and their mouths filled.

You were not the one who has to engineer the turning, and the long stretch behind you has never once been the whole account. Psalm 126 puts the laughing on the far side of something God did, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who went quiet at a table.

And there is something else in that psalm worth having tonight.

Nobody in it is disqualified by the length of what came before. The captivity was long. The psalm does not treat the length as a verdict on the people, and it does not make them account for the years before it turned.

You are not being asked to account for the length of it, and the years behind you have never once been a charge against you. The written word starts its record at the turning and not at the fault, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman who has been quietly dreading that question ever since.

What the year actually held

Here is what I suspect the year held, and tell me if this is close.

It held a great deal of carrying. Somebody was ill, or something ended, or the work got heavy, or all three, and the whole of your capacity went into keeping things upright.

Carrying does not produce a finished thing. It produces a continuing thing, which is invisible at a table, and which costs more than any finished thing you could name.

You were carrying something all year that produced nothing to hold up, and the invisibility of it has never once meant it was not work. Psalm 126 is written by people who had been through a long stretch and were not asked to justify it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land for a woman who got a whole household through a bad year.

So the hunt at the table was not a hunt for evidence about your character.

It was a hunt in the wrong category. You were looking for completed objects in a year that was spent on continuing people, and there were never going to be any, and the fright you felt was a filing error and not a finding.

You were looking in the wrong category and calling the empty result a verdict, and that verdict has never once been accurate. The text refuses to grade anybody by the length of the hard part, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has been carrying a wrong conclusion since that evening.

One thing, and the date

So here is what I want you to do, and the second half of it is the strange half.

Finish one drawer tonight. Twenty minutes, everything out, put back what you want, shut it.

Then say the date out loud. Just the date, in the room, once.

You are putting a date on something finished, and a date has never once been a small thing to be able to name. Psalm 126 marks a then, a moment when it turned, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman standing in a kitchen saying a date to nobody.

Here is why the date and not the drawer.

What hurt at that table was not the absence of a tidy house. It was the absence of a marker, a point you could name. The drawer gives you a point. Saying the date fixes it, so the next time somebody asks, there is a real thing with a real day attached to it and no hunting.

You are placing a marker you can find again, and a marker has never once had to be impressive to be real. The written word fixes a moment with the word then, which is a very small word doing a great deal of work, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land for a woman who has just made a date out of an ordinary Tuesday.