Forty Years and a Tuesday

It was a Tuesday, which she keeps coming back to, because a Tuesday is not a day that anything is supposed to happen on.

She is sixty-eight. They have been married forty years in November. She found something out on a Tuesday afternoon, in the ordinary way a person finds a thing out, not looking for it, not suspecting it, in a house she has kept since 1989.

That was eleven days ago.

And here is what she has been doing since, and she could not have predicted it and nobody warned her. She has been going through the house.

Not searching. Looking. She stands in the hall and looks at the wedding photograph and does not know what she is looking at. She looks at the chair he sits in. She looks at a holiday photograph from 2011 and finds herself doing arithmetic about 2011. Forty years of a life is not stored in a person's head as a summary, it is stored in rooms and habits and objects and the smell of a coat, and every single one of those has become a question she does not know how to answer.

That is the part nobody tells you about finding out late. It is not only forward. It is backward, over four decades, and every good memory now has to be examined and she does not want to examine any of them and she cannot stop.

She has told nobody. Her friends are her age and have known him for thirty-five years and there is no way to say a sentence about this to any of them that does not detonate in a whole community. Her daughter would want to do something. Her pastor is younger than her son.

So she has been standing in her own front room for eleven days.

And you know that hall. You found out about somebody you love, and the discovery did not stay in the present tense. It went backward and started asking questions about years you thought were settled, and there is no procedure anywhere for that.

So take this in before we go a step further, because you have been alone in these rooms for eleven days. You are not by yourself in this house and you have not been for one hour of it. Isaiah 41:10 has God saying fear not, for I am with thee, and every clause in that sentence is something He does, and the Holy Spirit is standing in this front room with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Every clause is something He does

There is a verse everybody has heard, and the reason it is worth slowing down on is that almost nobody looks at how it is built.

Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.Isaiah 41:10

Read it as a list. Fear not, and the reason given is not that things are fine, it is I am with thee. Be not dismayed, and the reason is I am thy God. Then three promises in a row, and every one of them has God as the one doing it: I will strengthen, I will help, I will uphold.

There is not one clause in that verse that describes something the frightened person has to produce. Not one. The two instructions are fear not and be not dismayed, and both of them are immediately given a reason that is entirely outside the person being addressed.

That matters enormously to a woman standing in a hall who cannot manage to feel calm and has begun to think that failing to feel calm is a further failure. The verse is not asking her to generate anything. It is telling her what is holding her up while she stands there.

You are being upheld by a right hand that is not yours, and it was doing that on the Tuesday. The written word puts every active verb on God and gives the frightened person nothing to manufacture, which means eleven days of not managing to feel steady has changed nothing about who is holding you; and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that upholding, in a hall, in front of a wedding photograph.

And notice the last image. Upheld with the right hand of His righteousness. Not your righteousness. Not your forty years of keeping a home and raising children and being at church every Sunday since 1986, all of which is real and none of which is what is holding you now. His.

Looking backward is not disloyalty

I want to name something you may be judging yourself for, because you almost certainly are.

You have been going through forty years and reinterpreting, and some part of you feels that this is a betrayal of the good in them. It is not. What you are doing is what a mind does after new information arrives: it goes back through the record. That is not suspicion and it is not bitterness, it is the ordinary work of a mind trying to build one coherent account out of two, and it will exhaust you and it is not a moral failure.

And here is the thing that will take longer to believe and is true. The good years were good. Whatever else turns out to be true, a birthday in 1997 in which everybody laughed was a birthday in which everybody laughed. Two things can be true at once, and holding both of them is the hardest work a person ever does, and the fact that you cannot do it in eleven days is not a comment on you.

You are not disloyal for going through the rooms, and the good in them was real. Psalm 31:7 says thou hast known my soul in adversities, and knowing there is the intimate word, the one for being thoroughly acquainted with a person rather than informed about them; His Spirit is the one doing that knowing at whatever pace He keeps, and He is not evaluating how you are handling eleven days.

And there is a second half, and it needs saying plainly to a woman who is sixty-eight. Nothing on this page is going to tell you what to do about your marriage. Not stay, not go, not forgive by Christmas, not confront on Sunday. Anybody who tells you that from a distance, in writing, without knowing you or him or forty years, is not being kind, they are being careless with a person's life. That is yours, and it will take as long as it takes, and there is no timetable that anybody has the right to hand you.

You are not being given instructions here, and no one gets to schedule any of this for you. Psalm 55:22 says cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee, and sustaining is an ongoing action taken by somebody else on a person who is still carrying the situation; the same Spirit doing that sustaining is the one who has been in this house for eleven days.

And I will say this without softening it. Eleven days of standing in rooms alone is enough, and being sixty-eight does not make you too old to need somebody. Find one real person this week. If everybody in your life knows him, then find somebody who does not: a counselor, a pastor two towns over, a doctor if you are not sleeping. If the nights are getting dark, do not wait. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a person will answer.

The rooms will take as long as they take

Here is what is actually available to you today, and it is smaller than what you want.

Not an answer about forty years. You are eleven days in. Nobody resolves four decades in eleven days and any conclusion arriving this week should be treated as weather.

Not a decision about anything. There is no deadline. Nobody is standing over you.

What is available today is one sentence said out loud about yourself that has nothing to do with him or with any of this, and one name of one person you will tell. That is the whole assignment, and it is deliberately small, because a woman who has been silent in her own house for eleven days needs a first act she can actually perform.

You have something the right size for today, and it does not require you to have decided anything. Scripture says I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness, and upholding is something done to somebody who is still standing in the middle of it; the Holy Spirit is the one who kept you upright in a hall in front of a photograph you could not look at.

So the house is not a museum of a life you have to reassess before supper. It is a house you have kept since 1989, and a woman standing in it who is being held up by a hand that is not her own.