I Made Myself Stop Picturing It

There was a time when you could see it.

Not vaguely. In detail. You knew where the light came in and what would be on the table and roughly what time of day it was, and you had seen it so many times that it had the quality of a memory rather than a hope.

You used to let yourself have it on the walk back from the post office. It was the best five minutes of the week.

And then one autumn you stopped.

You did not decide it in a way you would recognize as deciding. You got to the part of the walk where you usually let it come, and you did not, and you looked at the hedge instead. And the next week you did the same. And after a while your mind stopped offering.

You have not seen it in a long time now. Years. If you went looking for it deliberately you are not sure it would still be there in that detail, and you have not tested that, and you know exactly why you have not tested it.

Let me say something first.

I am not telling you off.

There is nothing weak in this and nothing to be ashamed of. Nobody who has held a picture for as long as you held that one, without it arriving, is going to be able to keep holding it up forever with their own arms. And I am not going to suggest that it has not come because you stopped looking at it.

I am saying I know about the walk back from the post office. That is all.

The sickness has a name in the book

Here is the verse, and the first thing worth noticing is that it exists at all.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.Proverbs 13:12

Somebody sat down and wrote that into the Bible. That is what I want you to sit with for a second.

Not hope disappointed. Not hope betrayed. Hope deferred, which is the ordinary, unspectacular condition of wanting a thing that has not turned up yet and has not been refused either.

And what it does to a person is named as a sickness. Not a sin. Not a weakness of character. Something that happens to the heart the way a thing happens to a body, and the writer treats it as a fact of the world rather than as a fault in the sufferer.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, sitting where you are with the stove going.

You are not being blamed for the sickness. Not one day, not once you can look at the picture again, not when the desire finally comes. Right now, exactly as you are, you are the person that proverb was written about, and it names your condition without a word of reproach in it. That is not my kindness to you. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real woman in a real front room.

Now, why did you make yourself stop looking?

Because the looking was doing something to you and you could feel it doing it.

Every time that picture came up, the distance came up with it, the distance between the picture and the room where you stood, and the two of them arrive together and cannot be separated. And after enough years, the five best minutes of the week turned into the five that took the most out of you.

That is not faithlessness. That is a woman treating her own sickness the only way she knew how, which was to stop touching the sore place.

But hear the second half of that proverb, because most people stop at the first. When the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. The writer does not say the desire is dangerous. He says the wanting deferred makes you sick and the wanting satisfied is a tree of life, and both halves are about the same desire. He never once suggests killing it.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You are safe holding it and safe if it never arrives, and the safety was never contingent on the picture. The word gives that condition a name and puts it in the middle of a book of wisdom without an ounce of blame attached, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real chest that has learned to look at hedges.

You are allowed to want it again. Wanting is not the same as expecting, and neither of them decides whether you are held.