Deleting Appointments, Keeping Three

The laptop is open on the kitchen table and the calendar is on the screen and she has been at it for about forty minutes.

August is the worst one. August is full.

She deletes the Tuesday. The little colored box goes and the row closes up like water. She deletes the Friday after it. There is a booking reference in the notes field of that one and she reads it, all fourteen characters of it, before she takes it out too.

Then the recurring ones, and those are different, because the machine asks. A box comes up in the middle of the screen and wants to know whether she means to delete this event, or this and all future occurrences, and there is something obscene about a computer asking a question like that in a friendly font with two tidy buttons.

All future occurrences.

She clicks it. Eleven blocks go at once, down the screen, Wednesday after Wednesday after Wednesday.

The kettle boiled a while ago and she has not got up.

She works on into September. She takes out the thing in October that she had been looking forward to since March.

And then she reaches the week after next and stops, because there are three left, and she is sitting there looking at them, and she cannot work out why they are still there.

Thursday morning, her mother's birthday.

The second Sunday, marked at nine, which is nothing, which is just church.

And a Tuesday with one word on it in her own handwriting from the tablet: Ruth. Which means Ruth is going to call, because Ruth calls on Tuesdays and has done for six years, and nothing that has happened changes what Ruth does on a Tuesday.

Three blocks in a month she has otherwise emptied.

She does not do anything about them. She does not feel better. She sits with her hand resting on the trackpad, looking at three small rectangles she does not have to touch, while the tea she made forty minutes ago goes cold at her elbow.

That is you.

Yours might not be a calendar. It might be a shelf, or a shared drive, or a drawer with a set of keys in it that do not open anything now. But you have been going through your own life taking out the parts of it that stopped being true, and it is a strange, quiet, administrative kind of grief that nobody has a good word for.

I am not going to tell you what the three are for. Nobody knows that, and I will not invent it for you. What is left is not a message. It is just what is left, and we are going to sit with it a while without making it mean anything.

The man who wrote this was in the middle of it

Read the lines just before the ones I am going to quote, because they change what the quote is.

He says his days are consumed like smoke. He says his heart is smitten and withered like grass. He says he forgets to eat. He is not writing a reflection about a hard season he came through; he is writing from inside it, with the smoke still in the room.

And then, without one word of transition, the same man says this:

They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.Psalm 102:26-27

You are looking at a month that emptied and at a God whose years have no end, and both of those are true in the same afternoon. Psalm 102 sets the withering and the unchanging down side by side in one poem and never resolves either into the other, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person carry both at once instead of being made to choose which one to believe today.

Look also at what the psalm calls the things that go. A garment. A vesture. Not a distraction, not a lesser thing, not something the writer should not have been so attached to.

A garment is what you wore. A garment is warm. Nobody has ever described something that did not matter as clothing.

You have not been asked to say that what you deleted this afternoon did not matter. The written line dignifies the thing that wears out by calling it a robe, which is the language of something worn close and used daily, and His Spirit does not ask anybody to pretend about a loss before He will come anywhere near it.

The three you did not have to touch

Now, carefully, because this is where somebody usually says the wrong thing to you.

I am not going to tell you those three were kept back on purpose so that you would find them. I do not know that. Nobody does, and a person who says it is guessing out loud in your kitchen.

What can be said is much smaller, and it is only a description. A thing that did not move when everything around it moved was never being held up by the thing that came down. Your mother's birthday was not resting on any of it. Church at nine was not resting on it. Ruth was not resting on it.

You have not lost the thing that was actually holding you, and you were not the one holding it up. That is not a moral drawn from your calendar; it is what Psalm 102:27 says about God directly, that He endures while the garments wear through, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an old line like that arrive as company rather than as information.

And here is the part that matters more than the three.

The psalm's ground is not that a few things survived. It is Him. If there had been nothing at all left in that month, not one rectangle, verse 27 would not have changed by a single word.

You are held by the One whose years have no end, and that would be exactly as true if the whole month had come out empty. Psalm 102:27 rests on His nature and never on the reader's inventory, and it is His Spirit who steadies somebody in the gap between what they have left and what they have lost.