The Appointment Card in the Drawer

The card is folded twice and it lives under the tea towels in the second drawer down.

It is nothing. A routine check, printed on cheap card, for a morning in the January. He did not go, because their granddaughter had her thing at the school that week and the two of them drove up instead, and he said he would ring and make another one. She wrote a new date on the back of the card in biro so it would not get lost.

That date came and went. Nobody rang. It was a shoulder that ached and they both said it was the guttering he had been up at in the wet, and that was the last conversation either of them ever had about it.

Two years on she takes it out of the drawer. Not every day. Enough.

And that card is only the front page of the file, because there is a whole file. His brother, who came every Sunday for years, stopped ringing about four months in and now sends a card at Christmas with just the name. The couple they ate with every Friday faded so gradually that there was never a moment to notice. The rota at church took her name off, kindly, so as not to burden her, and nobody ever put it back on.

So the audit runs, and it runs at two in the afternoon in an empty kitchen with the radio off. What did I do. What did they see in those eleven months. Was I sharp with him on the Tuesday. Should I have made him go in the January. What is it about me that things left with him.

She would not call it that. She would say she thinks about it sometimes.

She has been the prosecution, the defense and the only witness in that room for two years, and no judge has ever sat, and she cannot work out how to end a trial that nobody started.

You have a drawer like that one. It might not be a card.

What this is not

Somebody, meaning it well, will have called it a pruning. Perhaps in the porch after the funeral, perhaps in a message with a verse under it.

I am not going to do that.

There is a picture in the Scriptures of a vinedresser and a knife, and I am not reaching for it here, and I want to say why in plain words. The moment a man's death gets filed as horticulture, a woman has been handed a reason for the worst thing that ever happened to her by somebody with no standing whatever to give her one. I do not know what your January was. I know what it was not.

It was not discipline. It was not correction. It was not a lesson, a refining, a stripping back, a making room, or God taking something because He wanted your attention. It was not a bill for anything you did. Nothing about the way you loved him in those eleven months brought it about, and nothing you failed to say on a Tuesday moved a hand in heaven.

That is the whole of what I will say about the why, and I am going to stop there, because the next sentence in every version of this conversation is where the damage gets done.

Here is what the written word does instead. It does not explain. It shows something.

Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no tender compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands; your walls are continually before Me.Isaiah 49:15-16

Read the verse before it and you find out who is being answered. Zion has just said, out loud, that the Lord has forsaken her and her Master has forgotten her. That accusation is left standing in the text. Nobody edits it, softens it, or tells her she should not feel that way.

Zion said it first and God let it stand: forsaken, forgotten. Scripture keeps her sentence on the page and answers it without one word of correction, and His Spirit is doing exactly that over a kitchen drawer this afternoon. You are held while you are accusing Him, and you have never been anywhere else.

The hands, not the reason

Now look at what the answer actually is, because it is not what anybody expects.

Isaiah 49:15 asks a question and refuses to answer it with a reason. Can a woman forget her nursing child. That is what the Holy Spirit sets in front of a woman running an audit at two in the afternoon: you are not forgotten, and the evidence offered is a pair of hands rather than an explanation.

He does not say, here is why the ten years happened. He does not say, here is the good it did. He holds His hands out and shows her that her name is cut into them, and that is the entire answer, and it turns out to be enough for a whole nation.

Look at what is on those palms in Isaiah 49:16. Not the January. Not the appointment that never got made, not the shoulder, not the sharp word on the Tuesday. A name, cut in, deliberate, permanent, and the Spirit is the one who reads it out over the top of your list: you are the thing engraved there, and nothing else on your file made it onto His hands.

I could give you three reasons for the January and every single one of them would be a lie in a kind voice. The written word gives Zion no reason at all, and the Holy Spirit has never once handed a grieving woman a purpose for a death. What is given instead is engraving, and engraving outlasts a reason by a very long way.

And if you are reading this from the middle of it, if the January is this month and nothing is over, nothing here is asking you to have finished anything. The verse was spoken over people still in the ruins with the walls down. You have not been forgotten in there either.

Notice the tense as well. Isaiah 49:16 does not say I intend to engrave you. It says I have engraved you, done, complete, and the Spirit is pressing that over a drawer under some tea towels: you were engraved before the card was printed, before the January, before the guttering, and not one line of your audit has scratched it out.

The Spirit is not waiting for you to stop the trial before He says any of this. He is saying it now, into the middle of the hearing, on the ground of a verse that answers an accusation with an open hand. You have never once dropped out of God's memory, and you have never once been on trial in His.