Nine Years Of Letters, No Reply

The desk is under the front window because that is where the light is until about eleven, and Ellen writes on Saturday mornings, and she has done since the year Daniel left.

She uses the pad with the blue lines and she writes with a proper pen because a proper pen makes her slow down. Mug on the left. The pile of stamps in the little dish that used to be her mother's.

She keeps it short. She learned that early on. Nobody wants four sides from an aunt.

She tells him the ordinary things. That the tree at the corner came down in the wind and it turns out the roots were gone all along. That she has taken up the swimming again and is slow but is going. That Mrs. Aherne asked after him, which is true, and which she includes every time it happens because she thinks he should know that somebody in that town says his name.

She does not ask him to come home. She has never once asked him to come home, and she is proud of that and it costs her every single time.

She signs it the same way. Then the envelope, then the stamp from the dish, then out to the mailbox at the corner before the eleven o'clock pickup.

Nine years. Call it four a year and you are somewhere near forty letters.

Not one reply. Not a text. Not a card at Christmas. Not one word, in nine years, and she knows he gets them because none of them has ever come back, and she has the address from his mother and it has changed three times and every time somebody has passed the new one along.

Some Saturdays she sits down and the pen does not move for a while.

The thought is always the same and it never gets less reasonable. That she is a woman of sixty-eight writing into a hole in the ground. That she has spent nine years on something that has no other end of it. That she is, and here is the word she actually uses about herself when she is tired, a fool.

She writes it anyway. She goes out to the corner in her coat. She puts it in and hears it go.

And she will not be told this, and there is no way in the world she could find it out.

Daniel has moved four times in nine years. Two of those moves were bad ones and one of them happened in a hurry with almost nothing.

He has never once left the box behind.

Where a thing goes when it leaves your hand

There is a psalm that Israel sang coming back from exile, and it has one of the strangest promises in the whole book in it, because it is a promise about crying.

He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.Psalm 126:6

Look at the word precious. That is the sower's own valuation, made at the moment of letting go. The seed in his hand is grain he could have eaten. What he is doing looks, from the outside and from the inside, like throwing food away into dirt.

And then it goes out of sight. That is the whole method. Seed that stays where you can see it has not been planted, it has been stored, and stored seed does nothing at all except get older.

You have been doing the one thing that has to happen out of sight, and you were doing it correctly on every Saturday you could not see a result. I am not saying that to make forty letters feel better. Psalm 126:6 is written, it puts the weeping and the precious seed in the same hand at the same time, and the Holy Spirit is what takes a song sung by exiles and sets it down on a woman at a desk with a pen that will not move.

Notice what the psalm does not do. It does not tell the sower to check. It does not build in a reporting stage. There is going out, and there is the seed leaving the hand, and then there is a coming back that is God's arithmetic and not the sower's.

You are not owed a report, and you were never told that one was part of the arrangement. Ecclesiastes 11:6 says to scatter in the morning and in the evening and not to withhold your hand, because you do not know which will prosper, and the written word puts your not knowing right there in the instruction as an ordinary working condition. The Spirit is not embarrassed by the silence. He has been working underneath it.

The silence is not a report card

Here is the thing I want to take off you, and I want to take it off you completely.

Nine years of no reply is not a measurement of you. It is not a mark. It is not God's quiet way of indicating that you got something wrong, and it is not a test you are being scored on, and it is certainly not evidence that what you have been doing was small or thin or badly done.

Silence is a fact about a mailbox. That is the entire size of it.

You are not being graded by the quiet, and you were never entered into anything that had a grade. Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, the written word puts that first and unconditionally, and the Spirit does not use silence as a coded message. When God wants to say something, He says it.

And I want to be honest with you about what I cannot offer, because a great deal of harm gets done in this exact spot by people meaning well.

I cannot tell you that you will hear from him. I have no idea. Nobody who does not know your family has any business telling you what is coming in the mail, and anybody who does it is comforting you with something they made up.

What I can tell you is what the word says about the seed, and the word is not vague about it. It says the seed is precious in the hand of the one who is crying while they scatter it. Not precious once it comes up. Precious now, in the going out, on the Saturday with the pen and the coat and the walk to the corner.

You have been carrying something real, and it was real on the mornings it felt like a hole in the ground. First Corinthians 3:6 says one plants and another waters and God gives the increase, and the written word deliberately separates the planting from the increase so that nobody ever has to hold both. The Spirit is the One who does the part that happens underground, and He has never asked you to supervise it.