The Anniversary I Kept Anyway

Thirty-one years. The same restaurant they have been coming to since it was under different management, and the corner table, which they ask for and usually get.

There is a candle on it. She is wearing the earrings he gave her for the twenty-fifth. She is telling him about something their daughter said on the phone and she is laughing at the part she always laughs at, which is a thing he has loved about her since 1994 and which is happening about four feet from him right now.

He found out eight days ago.

He did not cancel. That is the fact he keeps returning to, sitting there with a menu he is not reading. He thought about it for two days, and the trouble with canceling a thirty-first anniversary dinner is that it requires a reason, and a reason requires a conversation, and he is not ready for that conversation and does not know when he will be, and so on Thursday he simply let the reservation stand.

And now he is here.

And the strangest part, the part he could not have anticipated in a hundred years, is that he is enjoying it.

Not through the whole thing. It goes in waves. But there are stretches of five and six minutes where he is genuinely with her, laughing at the daughter story, being handed the bread, arguing about whether the place has changed, and then something comes back into the room and sits down at the table with them and he goes quiet for a second and she says are you all right and he says just tired.

And he does not know what to do with a man who can be having a lovely evening and the worst evening of his life at the same time, and he does not know which one is the lie.

And you know that table. You found out about somebody you love, and then the ordinary calendar kept going, and there was a birthday or a Christmas or a Sunday lunch that did not know what had happened, and you went, and you did not know what you were doing there.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not a fraud sitting at that table. Psalm 139:5 says thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me, and beset is a word about being surrounded on all sides, and the Holy Spirit is at this table with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

He does not correct the man

There is a line in the seventy-third psalm that says something people are usually discouraged from saying out loud, and the psalm does not argue with it.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

My flesh and my heart faileth. Present tense. Not: they were failing and then I recovered my perspective. He is saying it as a current report on his own condition, and nothing in the verse corrects him. Nobody in that psalm tells him he should be doing better.

What the verse does instead is put a second thing beside the first one without canceling it. Yes, and. My flesh fails, and God is the strength of my heart. Both clauses stand. The failing is not withdrawn when the strength is named.

That is the whole architecture, and it is what a man needs at a corner table on his thirty-first anniversary. Because you have been trying to work out which one is the real evening, the lovely one or the terrible one, and the psalm's answer is that this is the wrong question. Both. Yes, and.

You are held by a strength that does not require the failing to stop first. The written word lets a man say his heart is failing and then names God as his strength in the same breath without retracting anything, which means the two things you have been trying to reconcile were never in competition; and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that holding, at a corner table, with a candle on it.

And look at the second half of the verse. My portion for ever. A portion is what is allotted to you, your share, the piece that is yours by right and cannot be reassigned. Whatever else is uncertain about the next year of your life, the verse names one thing that is not in the settlement.

Both evenings were real

I want to be precise about what happened tonight, because you are going to lie awake trying to work out which of the two evenings was genuine.

They were both genuine. When you laughed at the daughter story you were laughing. That was not a performance and there was no calculation in it. And when it came back into the room and you went quiet, that was real too.

Human beings are not built to hold one thing at a time, and the assumption that a true feeling has to be exclusive is a very common idea and a completely false one. You can love a person and be devastated by something about them in the same four seconds. The devastation does not prove the love was pretend, and the love does not prove you are in denial.

You were not pretending at any point this evening, and neither of those was the lie. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and it locates Him rather than asking anything of the person; His Spirit does that being-near at whatever pace He keeps, and He is not sorting your evening into categories.

And here is the second thing, and I want to be exact. Nothing on this page will tell you what to do about your marriage, or when to speak, or whether tonight was a mistake. Not stay, not go, not forgive by any date, not have the conversation this weekend. Thirty-one years belongs to you and to her and to God, and a stranger writing at a distance handing you a timetable would be doing something reckless with two lives.

You are not under instruction here, and nobody has the standing to set your dates. Psalm 73:23 says nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand, and the holding is His action on a man in the middle of an unresolved complaint; the same Spirit doing that holding is the one who got you through the drive over.

And I will say this without softening it. Eight days, and a dinner you got through by yourself, is enough. Find one real person this week: a counselor, a pastor, a friend from another part of your life, a doctor if you are not sleeping. You do not have to name her and you do not have to describe anything. I found something out and I have nowhere to put it is complete. If the nights are getting darker than tired, do not wait for morning; in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a person will answer.

What you actually did tonight

Here is what I want you to see about this evening, because you are going to remember it wrongly.

You are going to remember it as the night you sat across from your wife and did not say anything, and you are going to file that under cowardice or under pretending.

Here is what you actually did. You showed up to a thirty-one-year table eight days after the worst news of your life and you were kind to somebody for two and a half hours. You handed her the bread. You laughed in the right places, and you laughed genuinely. You did not use the evening to punish anybody, and you did not force a conversation you were not ready for at a table with a candle on it in a public room.

Whatever else this year turns out to be, that was not nothing. That was a man being careful with a person he loves on a night when he had every excuse not to be.

You are being held while you do things you did not know you could do. Scripture says God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever, and the strength is named as His at exactly the point where the man's own gives out; the Holy Spirit is the one who got a man through two and a half hours at a corner table.

So the anniversary is not a lie you told. It is thirty-one years, and a candle, and a woman laughing at the part she always laughs at, and a man being held up at the exact hour his own strength went.