The Sash in the Cedar Chest

Her daughter is up in the attic sorting things, which is a thing that happens when a woman turns fifty-one and a daughter decides it is time, and she comes down holding it.

Mom. What is this.

It is a sash. It is white and it has gone the color of weak tea along the folds, and it has a county and a year on it in letters that were gold thirty-four years ago. It is from a fair. It is the kind of thing a seventeen-year-old girl gets handed on a Saturday evening in front of a grandstand while a man with a microphone says her name and everybody her mother knows is standing up.

And she hears herself say: oh, that's nothing, put it back.

Which is the first lie she has told her daughter in about a decade, and they both know it, and the daughter has the sense to put it back in the chest and go get a glass of water and let her mother sit there.

Because here is what is actually true, and she has never once said it out loud. That sash has been in a cedar chest for thirty-four years. She has not taken it out and she has not thrown it away. She could not tell you why either. And she is aware, in a way she does not enjoy, that she has organized a great deal of a life around a verdict that a group of adults delivered in about nine seconds when she was seventeen years old.

Not the win. The verdict underneath it. Which was, in essence: this is the thing you are. And she was seventeen, and she believed them, because when a grandstand full of people stands up for a reason, you do not stop to ask what the reason implies about every year that comes after.

She is fifty-one. She has been married twenty-six years to a man who has never once mentioned any of this. She teaches Sunday school and she runs the concessions at the ball field. And she still cannot open a cedar chest.

And you know that chest. Somebody handed you a valuation before you were old enough to decline it, and this is the strangest kind, the kind that came wrapped as a compliment or a prize, because a burden that arrives as a gift is very hard to set down without seeming ungrateful.

Take this in before we go one line further, because I think you have already braced for a lecture about pride. You are not vain and you have not spent thirty-four years being silly. Psalm 139:14 says you are fearfully and wonderfully made and it says it as a plain settled fact, and the Holy Spirit is up here in this attic with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Precious, and then the reason

There is a line in Isaiah that people quote half of, and the half they leave off is the half that does the work.

Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable, and I have loved thee: therefore will I give men for thee, and people for thy life.Isaiah 43:4

Read the order. Precious in My sight comes first. Honorable comes second, and it comes as a consequence of the first. And loved comes third, and it is in the past tense, which means it was already going on before the sentence started.

Now go looking in that verse for a reason located in the person. It is not there. Nothing in the sentence says: because you were remarkable, or because you turned out well, or because a grandstand stood up. The whole weight rests on in My sight, which is a statement about where the valuing happens, and it does not happen in a county in the summer of a girl's seventeenth year.

You are precious in His sight, and the sight doing the valuing is not a grandstand's. The written word puts the preciousness before the honor and gives no reason for it that lives inside the person being valued; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that order into an attic where a cedar chest has just been opened.

And notice the tense on loved. I have loved thee. Not I will if. Not I did while. A finished, running, already-underway thing that was in motion before anybody thought to give her a sash.

Why a prize is harder to put down than an insult

I want to be honest about why this one is so difficult, because if I pretend a good memory should be easy to hold lightly you will read your own difficulty as failure, and it is not.

An insult you can eventually name as an insult. A prize is much harder, because everything about it was kind. Nobody was cruel. Your mother was proud. It was a good night. And a burden that arrived inside a good night cannot be resented, and so it never gets examined, and it sits in a chest for thirty-four years being untouchable in both directions at once.

And there is the other edge, which is the one that actually cuts. If that is the thing you are, then every year since has been a year of being slightly less of it. Nobody says that out loud. But a woman who was crowned at seventeen has a relationship with time that a woman who was not does not have, and she has usually never been able to tell a living soul.

You were not foolish to take it in, and you were seventeen and standing in front of a grandstand. Deuteronomy 32:10 says He found him in a desert land and compassed him about and kept him as the apple of His eye, and the finding and the keeping are both His verbs; His Spirit does that keeping at whatever pace He chooses and does not ask you to earn a minute of it.

And there is a second thing under it that ought to be said gently. You have not been able to throw it away because throwing it away would say that the night meant nothing, and it did mean something, and you are not willing to lie about that either. That is not weakness. That is integrity working with the wrong tools.

You are not being asked to throw anything out, and nobody is holding a clock on this. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is a verse about a God who does not expect a person to be more durable than He made them; the same Spirit doing that remembering is the one who sent a daughter up an attic ladder on an ordinary afternoon.

And if what came out of that chest is heavier than a page can hold, do not sit with it alone. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let them be somebody you can say one true sentence in front of.

What the daughter actually asked

Here is what I want you to notice, because she did not ask what everybody assumes she asked.

She did not say: were you the prettiest girl in the county. She said: what is this. She is thirty and she has been in that attic all afternoon and she found an object she has never seen, and she asked her mother a question, and what she got was oh, that's nothing, put it back.

Which means the sash is not the problem in that house. The problem is that a woman has a room in herself that her own daughter has never been allowed into, and the door has a fair ribbon on the handle.

You are allowed to open it, and you do not have to explain it well. Scripture says thou wast precious in my sight and I have loved thee, and that is said to a whole people about a settled thing rather than to an individual about a good year; the Holy Spirit is the one who is opening a chest that has been shut in two directions since 1992.

So the sash is not a verdict and it is not a shame either. It is a piece of cloth from a good evening that a girl deserved to enjoy, and the girl was precious before she walked out under those lights and she was precious walking home. And the daughter is downstairs and she is not going to ask again unless you tell her she can.