Two Lines I Know By Heart

Two lines. That is all it was. And you could write them out from memory right now, with the punctuation.

Something about how they have decided to go elsewhere for the time being. Something about how they have appreciated everything. No reason, no complaint, nothing to take hold of, and four years of work ending in the time it takes to read a text.

And you have been back to it. Not once. You have opened that message to look at it again and again, and every time you have gone at it like a page of evidence, looking for the actual reason hidden behind the polite one.

It is not hidden behind the polite one. There is no code in it. You have read it eleven times and it has said exactly the same thing eleven times.

I am not going to tell you to get over it, and I am not going to tell you how to win them back, which would be strategy and there is none of that here. I am going to talk about what it costs to keep reading.

The bottle and the book

There is a verse in the psalms about God keeping a record of what a person cries over, and the picture in it is almost shockingly domestic.

David is in real trouble, and in the middle of it he says this about God, who is apparently keeping something.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

You are being noticed in this, and that has never once depended on the size of the thing. Psalm 56:8 has tears collected and written down as though they were worth keeping, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a kitchen counter with a phone lying face up on it.

Look at what He is doing. Collecting. Counting. Writing it in a book. Not weighing it first to see whether it qualifies.

Nobody in that verse asks whether the crying was proportionate. There is no suggestion that a small grief gets a smaller bottle, and you have been assuming all week that yours does not count because it is only a customer.

You have a grief that is already counted, and it has never once had to justify itself first. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a line about tears in a bottle reach a woman who feels foolish for minding, and Psalm 56:8 has the wandering told and the tears kept without one word about whether they were warranted.

What the rereading is for

Let me say what the eleven readings are actually doing, because it is not information gathering.

You are looking for a reason, and the reason you want is one that is about you, because a reason about you can be fixed. Nothing in that message is about you, and an absence cannot be fixed, so you keep going back in case you missed it.

You were looking for something to repair, and there has never once been anything in those two lines to repair. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what her own rereading is hunting for, and the written word has tears kept in a bottle in Psalm 56:8 without demanding an explanation for them.

And here is what it costs, and it is not the minutes. Every time you open it you hand it the evening. The message is two lines long and it has taken a week, because you keep giving it another hearing, and each hearing confirms that there is nothing there.

You have been the only person working on this for seven days. They sent it and moved on, which is not cruelty, it is just what sending a message is.

You are not on trial in those two lines, and you never were. His Spirit is the one who takes a verdict out of a thing that never carried one, and Psalm 56:8 has a person's tears written in God's own book while the trouble is still going on.

Close it and work

So here is the exercise, and it is two things, and neither of them is a reply.

Close the message. Then do the next piece of work well.

You are able to put it down, and putting it down has never once meant you did not care. Psalm 56:8 has God keeping the record so that a person does not have to keep it themselves, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a closed phone possible for a woman who has opened it eleven times.

And do not send the reply you have been drafting. You have one. Everybody has one. It is gracious and it has one sentence in it that is really a question, and that sentence is the whole reason the message exists.

Leave it unsent. Not because they do not deserve a reply, but because you would be sending it to find out something they have already declined to tell you.

You were never owed an explanation, and the absence of one has never once been a judgment. The Spirit of God carries a woman past the need to understand before she can work, and the written word has the tears collected and the wanderings told in Psalm 56:8 without a reason given anywhere.