Still the Same About the Shoes

It was Dilys who said it, at the coffee morning, with a hand on Ruth's arm and a custard cream in the other one.

"It must have changed you. All that."

She meant it beautifully. She has known Ruth for eleven years and she was there with lasagne when nobody knew what was happening, and Ruth loves her.

Ruth said something warm. She cannot remember what. Then she carried two mugs back to the hatch and stacked the chairs and drove home.

At the red light on the bypass, the long one by the retail park, she tried to think of one thing.

One. Any one. A single way she is a different mother from the woman who walked into that building two years ago.

The light changed and she still had nothing.

There is a note on her phone from the anniversary. It is titled What Is Different. There is nothing under it. She opened it at the time meaning to fill it in, and she has opened it perhaps nine times since, and it is still one line of text on a white screen.

And that evening, at ten to eight, she shouted about the shoes.

The same shoes. The same place in the hall, one on the mat, one under the radiator, where they land every single day of her life. The same pitch of voice. Sam made the same face he has made since he was four, and went upstairs the same way, and she stood at the bottom of the stairs with her hand on the newel post.

She would not have said she was sad. She would have said she was fine.

She stood there thinking one clear sentence, and here it is, in the words she actually used in her own head.

Nothing took.

I want to be careful here, because you know why you are reading this.

It might not be shoes. It might be that you still cannot get out of the door on time. It might be that you still cannot talk to your mother without going flat. It might be that you spent a year and a half in the worst place you have ever been, and you came out of it and you are exactly, boringly, humiliatingly yourself.

And somewhere in the last few months, a suspicion has moved in and taken a seat: that everybody else comes out of these things deepened, and you came out the same, and you are the one it did not work on.

If you are reading this while it is still happening, and there is no anniversary yet because it has not ended, put this one down. There is nothing here you need today.

Down first, and it is not a stage with an end date

Here is what God said to a city that had nothing to show for two years, and look at what order He says it in.

And the surviving remnant of the house of Judah shall again take root downward and bear fruit upward.Isaiah 37:31

Everybody keeps telling you the hard thing must have deepened you, and they mean it as a kindness, and it arrives like a bill you have no way of paying. Isaiah 37:31 says nothing about fruit first. It says root downward, then fruit upward, in that order, and the Holy Spirit has never once run it backwards for anybody's convenience. You are not stalled. You are being held down there, and downward is a direction, not a delay.

Before I go further, one thing has to be said plainly, and then I am not going to touch it again.

I am not going to tell you that the ward did this to you. It did not. Suffering is not fertiliser, nobody's child was ill in order to produce a better parent, and I will not sell you a reason for it dressed up as encouragement. God is the one doing the rooting. He was doing it long before that February, and He did not pause for it, and He is not waiting for you to extract a lesson before He carries on.

Which is where the passive voice in the letters starts to matter.

Colossians 2:7 says rooted and built up in Him and established in the trust. Established. Somebody else is doing that verb. It is not a thing an exhausted woman performs on herself at ten to eight in a hallway, and it is not paused because she raised her voice about footwear. The Spirit is the one doing it, quietly, in a house where nothing has looked different for two years. You have roots you have never once seen.

Now look at who Isaiah is actually talking to, because it changes the temperature of the whole sentence.

Jerusalem is under siege. The fields are outside the walls and the enemy is standing in them. Nobody can get out to plant. And the sign God hands them in Isaiah 37 is that they will eat what comes up of itself, and then what sprouts from that, and He says it without one word of reproach about their empty barns. He does not scold a besieged city for having nothing to show. He calls the whole arrangement a sign. And the Spirit is not standing over your two years asking where the harvest is. You have never once been asked for one.

I am not handing you a third year on a calendar. That word was spoken to that city, and I am not going to turn it into a schedule for your life. What travels is the order and the tone: down before up, and God saying it out loud, unhurried, to people with nothing in the ground.

What you cannot audit

The trouble with rooting is that it is the one part of growth with no photograph.

You can photograph fruit. You can photograph a wall, a haircut, a certificate, a child at a sports day. Nobody has ever taken a picture of the third winter of a root system, and if they did, nobody would put it on the wall.

So you audit yourself instead, at red lights, with the only instrument in reach, which is your feeling about your own temper. It is a terrible instrument. It was never calibrated for this.

I cannot name for you what has changed. I was not in your hallway at ten to eight. Philippians 1:6 can name it: He who began a good work in you completes it, and the beginning was His and the completing is His and the long middle is where you happen to live. The Holy Spirit is the evidence in that sentence, not your own read on your own patience. You have a good work in you that started before the ward and did not stop when the ward did.

And none of this is me being generous about your shouting. It is what the Spirit has been pressing into you through Isaiah 37:31 for two years while you have been auditing yourself at traffic lights. Root downward first. You are rooted, present tense, today, whether or not one single visible thing has moved since the spring before last. The roots are not on trial and neither are you.