Three Seatbelts and Nobody in Them

The mints were Yewande's idea, and after a while they stopped being an idea and became simply what was in the door pocket.

Nine years of the same route. Out at twenty to, left at the lights, Comfort at the top of Marsh Lane with her bag already on her arm because Comfort had never once kept anybody waiting. Then Deborah, who came out of her front door putting an earring in and talking. Then Ruth, outside the pharmacy, always five minutes early and always pretending she had only just got there.

Four women in a silver estate with a dent in the passenger door, going round the ring road on a Sunday morning, and the talking started before the second stop and did not properly stop until they were parked.

That car was the best hour of Yewande's week. She would say that out loud, back then, and mean it.

She has not driven that route since the February before last.

The car is the same car. She still buys the mints, which she has thought about and cannot explain, and they sit in the door pocket and go out of date and she buys more.

What she looks at, when she is stopped at the lights and the mirror catches it, is three seatbelts lying flat across an empty back seat. Not tangled. Not anything. Just flat, the way a belt hangs when nobody has touched it for a year and a half.

Nobody fell out. That is the thing she cannot get her hands around. There was no row, no letter, no scene in a car park. There was a conversation at the roundabout by the retail park, in the rain, with the indicator going, about something that had happened at that building and what Yewande had decided to do about it. She said four or five sentences. She has since said those four or five sentences to herself, in her head, at that same roundabout, in traffic, at the sink, at half past two in the morning, until she has worn the words smooth.

Then the messages got shorter. Then they got slower. Then there was a birthday she found out about afterwards.

And here is the part she has not told a living soul.

She keeps a list.

It is on the last page of a diary from two years ago, and it has eleven things on it, and each one is a sentence she thinks she might have said wrong, in a tone she might have used, on a day she can just about place. She adds to it. She has crossed two off and put one back on.

Eighteen months of prosecuting one woman with one file, and the woman is her.

A court with one chair in it

Look at the room you've been sitting in every night, because it matters what kind of room it is.

There is no judge in it. There is no witness. Nobody has brought a charge, nobody has read anything out, and there is no other party in the building. There is one woman with a diary and eleven items, running the case, giving evidence, and delivering the verdict, and then getting up the next night and doing the whole thing again from the top.

That is not justice. That is a treadmill wearing a wig.

So hear what God actually says over a person He has named, and notice where He starts.

But now, thus says the Lord, He who created you, O Jacob, He who formed you, O Israel: "Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name; you are Mine. When you pass through the waters, I am with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you."Isaiah 43:1 to 2

Isaiah 43:1 does not open with what the person did. It opens with a name spoken out of God's own mouth. I have called you by name; you are Mine. Not earned in the car, not reviewed after the roundabout, not conditional on who is still ringing you. That naming stands over you at this minute, and the Spirit of God is the one carrying it into a woman's kitchen while she looks at page eleven.

Read the order of it. The naming comes first. The water comes second. Whatever else is true about your last eighteen months, God did not name you and then hold a review.

Nobody is running this but you

Here is what the silence from those three women is not, and I am going to say it plainly and then stop, because plenty of people would keep talking here and the talking is where the damage gets done.

It is not a sentence passed on you. It is not a bill arriving. It is not a message in code that a careful woman could decipher by being honest enough with herself. It is not a pruning, it is not a lesson, it is not a filter, and it is not God removing people to show you something.

I am not going to tell you what it was for. Nobody honest can tell you that, and the ones who try are guessing out loud in a woman's kitchen.

What I can tell you is what has been settled. That is not my opinion of your back seat. It is what the Holy Spirit has been pressing into you through Psalm 103:10 for a year and a half while you filed it as a nice idea about somebody else. God does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our crookedness, and that means the quiet is not the repaying. You are not being invoiced by heaven through a group chat.

And I have no standing to close a case I did not open. Romans 8:1 closes it: there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and His Spirit is the one who carries that sentence into a silver car at a red light. You are not on trial in there. There is no case, there is no charge, and the eleven items on the last page of a diary have never once been read into a record anywhere in heaven.

What the water does and does not say

Look at the second half of the promise, because most of us were handed it wrong.

It does not say you go around the water. When you pass through the waters, I am with you. Through. The sentence admits the water. It does not tidy it up, shorten it, or explain it. What is written is that you have company in it, and the Spirit of God is that company, and there is not one syllable in Isaiah 43:2 that tells the person why the river is there.

Somebody taught you, somewhere, that a loss is a message, and that a careful enough woman can read it, find her fault, and put it right. Isaiah 43 does not read like that anywhere. Two verses further on, what is written over you is that you are precious in His eyes, and honored, and loved, present tense, in the middle of the water, with the current still going, and the Spirit has never once attached a footnote to that saying pending your findings.