The Paperwork Stopped

She is sitting on the floor with her back against the radiator, which is not on, and she has been there long enough that her foot has gone to sleep.

The room is pale yellow. She painted it eleven months ago, on a Saturday, two coats, with the window open and the radio on, and she chose yellow because they did not know and yellow does for anybody.

Her brother put up the shelf. It is a good shelf. It is very slightly not level and he knows it and she has never told him.

There is a lamp still in its box in the corner, because she was saving it, the way you save a thing when you are being careful not to get ahead of yourself. There is a drawer with three things folded in it that she bought in a supermarket in a different life, on a Tuesday, quickly, without letting herself linger in that part of the shop.

The letter came on Tuesday. It uses the phrase will not be proceeding. It has a reference number at the top and a name at the bottom of somebody she has spoken to twice on the phone, and the tone is careful and decent, and there is nothing in it she can argue with and nowhere to put the argument anyway.

So the whole of the next five years, which she could see, which had a shape, which had a first day of school in it and a certain kind of Christmas, is gone. Not delayed. Gone, in one envelope, on an ordinary Tuesday, in a room she painted.

She is not crying. She was, earlier, in the kitchen. Now she is just sitting on the floor of a yellow room with her foot gone to sleep, looking at a shelf that is not quite level.

That is you.

Maybe not adoption. Maybe a visa, a treatment, a house sale, a wedding, a contract, a move somebody else pulled out of after you had already told everyone. Maybe your five years were in a folder, and now the folder is a folder.

So let me say what I am not going to do, and then we can go on.

I am not going to tell you this happened for a reason, because I do not know one and the people who hand out reasons are guessing at your expense. I am not going to promise you a replacement, or hint at one, or say the words everything happens. And I am not going to tell you how this turns out, in either direction, because nobody on a page owes you a prediction and nobody on a page can keep it.

David tries to count and gives up

There is a psalm where a man starts counting something and stops in the middle because the number defeats him. Watch what he is counting, because it is not what you would expect.

Many, O LORD my God, are thy wonderful works which thou hast done, and thy thoughts which are to us-ward: they cannot be reckoned up in order unto thee: if I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered.Psalm 40:5

Thy thoughts which are to us-ward. Toward us. Not His plans in general, not His works out in the world somewhere. His thoughts turned in the direction of a particular person, and there are so many of them that a man with a harp and plenty of time cannot get to the end of the list.

You have been thought about more times than can be counted, and that was true on the Saturday you painted the room and it is true on the floor today. Psalm 40:5 puts those thoughts in the plural and then admits the plural is too small a word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is described as searching the deep things of God, which means somebody in the room with you tonight knows exactly what is on that unnumbered list.

Now notice what David does not say. He does not say he can read them. He does not claim to know what any single one of those thoughts contains, or when, or how.

You are not required to see the road in order to be kept on it. Scripture says the Lord orders the steps of a person, one step being a much smaller unit than a five year plan (Psalm 37:23), and His Spirit is called a guide rather than a map, which is a different kind of help and a better one on a night like this.

And here is the part that matters most on the floor of that room.

You were not caught out. None of this arrived at God as news. The written word says He knows the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10), and the same Spirit who was with you while you were rolling the second coat onto that wall did not leave the room when the letter came.

You have not been dropped. Psalm 40 opens with a man in a pit being lifted out and his feet set on a rock, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that lifting inside a person, at whatever pace it takes, without ever being asked to hurry up about it.

Nobody is replacing this for you

I want to be careful here, because this is where people get clumsy with a person in your situation.

Nothing on this page is a swap. Nobody is telling you that a different future is on its way, or that what you wanted was too small, or that God had something else in mind all along, which is a sentence people say without noticing that it makes Him the author of your Tuesday.

What is being said is narrower and it is stronger.

You are held by the One who holds what is ahead of you, and He was holding it before you knew there was anything to hold. That is what Psalm 40:5 means by thoughts already turned toward you, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the deposit on an inheritance nobody has described to you yet.

And the wanting. Let us name that, because you are quietly ashamed of it tonight.

You wanted it out loud. You painted a room. You told people. You are not being disciplined for hoping, and there is no correction here for painting too early. The written word says hope does not put a person to shame (Romans 5:5), and the very next clause of that verse says the reason is that the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.