Forty Years Of Cards

The shoebox lives under the bed on the left side, and Junie gets it out on the first of the month, because that is when she goes through and sees who is coming.

She sits on the edge of the candlewick bedspread with the box open beside her. Inside there is a rubber banded stack of cards she has not used yet, a book of stamps, a pen that works and one that does not, and the little brown address book with the corners gone soft, which is the whole operation really.

The address book has the birthdays in it. Every name has a date beside it in pencil, and some of the dates have been rewritten three or four times over the years as the pencil went pale.

She started it when she was in her forties, because her aunt had done it and because a woman on the road turned sixty and nobody remembered, and Junie went home from that and got a notebook out of the drawer.

Forty years. She has no idea how many cards. Two a week, some weeks four, and forty years of weeks. She does not add it up because adding it up would be a strange thing to do.

Sissy Frye, who left this road as a girl and lives outside Dayton now, gets one every March. Junie has not laid eyes on her since the girl was fourteen. The Combs boys, both of them, get one, and one of them has never written back and the other sends a photograph of a dog at Christmas. There is a woman in a care home in Prestonsburg who has been on the list for eleven years and cannot possibly know who Junie is anymore, and Junie sends it anyway, because taking a name out feels like a decision she is not entitled to make.

She writes the same sort of thing in all of them. Thinking of you on your day. The dogwood is out. We had a hard winter. Love, Junie.

That is it. That is the whole thing she has done.

And sitting there on the first of the month, eighty two years old, with the box open and the light coming through the half drawn curtain and landing on the bedspread, the thought arrives that has been arriving more often lately.

She has no idea if a single one of them ever mattered.

Not one person has ever told her. Why would they. You do not write to somebody to say that a card came on a bad week. People mean to and then the week passes and it is a small thing anyway.

So there is a box under a bed, and a book with pencil in it, and forty years, and no report of any kind.

She snaps the rubber band back around the stack. There are four in March.

The one person who never saw the coats

There is a moment in Acts that goes by fast, and the whole weight of it is in a detail that reads like set dressing.

A woman in Joppa dies. Her name is Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas, and the record of her is that she was full of good works and almsdeeds. They send for Peter, and when he gets there, the upper room is full of widows, and here is the line.

All the widows stood by him weeping, and shewing the coats and garments which Dorcas made, while she was with them.Acts 9:39

They are holding them up. That is what shewing means there. They are taking the coats off their own backs and out of their own bundles and holding them out toward a man who never met her, saying look, look what she made, look what I have been wearing.

Now count the people in that room who could see it happening.

Peter could. The widows could. Everybody on the stairs could.

The one person in the entire story who never saw a single coat held up was the woman who made them.

She sewed them one at a time in an ordinary house over an ordinary number of years, and she handed them over, and she went on to the next one, and she did not know. She did not know while she was making them and she did not know afterward. The landing was complete and it was real and it was going on in a room she was not in.

You are in the same position she was in, and it has never once meant that nothing landed. Acts 9:39 wrote it down, coats and all, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed to read a small domestic detail like that to a woman sitting on the edge of a bed with a shoebox open beside her.

Not knowing is the ordinary shape of it

Somewhere along the way you started reading the silence as a verdict, and I want to take that apart carefully, because it is not one.

The silence is not evidence that it did not land. The silence is what landing sounds like from the side you are standing on.

Think about how it actually goes. A card arrives on a Tuesday in a week that has been bad in a way nobody has been told about. It sits on the sill by the sink for eleven days. The woman who got it does not write back, because what would she say, and because writing back would mean explaining the week, and by the time the week is over the moment for it has gone.

That is not indifference. That is how people are, and you are the same when a kindness lands on you.

You have been landing on people the whole time you were waiting for confirmation. That is Scripture and not my hopefulness, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line and sets it down in a bedroom in the afternoon where a person is actually sitting.

And here is what I am not going to do, because it would be a lie dressed as comfort.

I am not going to tell you that somebody is going to tell you. I am not going to promise you a phone call, or a letter from Dayton, or a moment at the end of your life where they all stand up and hold something up. Nobody can promise you that, and anybody who does has moved from ministry into fortune telling.

What Scripture does is different and better. It does not promise Dorcas a report. It records the coats. It puts the upper room into the permanent record so that everybody afterward can know what was going on in the rooms they were not in.

You were never told, and the not being told has taken nothing away from what happened. The written word kept those garments in the account on purpose, and what the Spirit adds is that this is about you, personally, and not only about a woman in Joppa.