The Part Addressed To Me

The box came down off the top of the wardrobe about an hour ago and it is all over the rug now.

Photographs, mostly. Some of them of people nobody alive can name. Two orders of service. A child's drawing that has been folded so many times it has gone soft at the creases.

And a long letter, in an envelope that has been opened, from somebody who is gone.

You have read parts of that letter many times. You know the bit about your mother and you know the bit about the house and you know the paragraph about the war that everybody in the family quotes.

There are two pages in the middle that you have never read.

They start with your own name. Not the family. Not everybody. Your name, at the top of a page, in the middle of a letter, and you have folded past them every single time for a very long time.

Let me say something before we go any further.

I am not correcting you.

There is nothing wrong with a person who reads a letter in pieces. Some parts are easier than others and some parts want a day you have not had, and I am not going to suggest that folding past two pages for years is avoidance dressed up.

I am saying I know those two pages are in there. That is all.

Partakers

Here is a sentence about promises, and the word at the end of it is the one to sit with.

Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.2 Peter 1:4

Partakers.

Not observers. Not beneficiaries at a distance. Somebody who partakes has their hands in it, is at the table, is eating from the same dish.

And notice the mechanism. That by these ye might be partakers. The promises are how it happens. They are not decoration on the outside of the thing; they are the road into it.

Which means a promise read as being about other people has been a road looked at and not walked on.

So let me turn and say it straight to you, sitting on that rug with the box open.

You are a partaker rather than a reader. Not one day, not once you have found a suitable afternoon, not when it seems less overwhelming. Right now, on the floor with old photographs round you, you are inside a sentence where the promises are the road in and the word for what you become on it is partaker. That is not my sentiment. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written line down onto a real woman in a real front room.

Now, about the two pages.

I do not think it is grief exactly, or at least not only that. I think it is that reading them would make it particular.

The rest of that letter is about a family. The two pages are about you, and reading a thing that is about you, written by somebody who is gone, in your own front room, on an ordinary afternoon, requires something that the rest of it does not.

That is not weakness. That is a very reasonable estimate of what those two pages will cost.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have promises that were given rather than displayed, and the word for the person receiving them is one who partakes rather than one who reads about it. The word says given unto us, which is a completed handing over, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real room on a real afternoon with a box of papers open on the floor.

Read the pages with your name on them. That is the crossing, and it does not need a better day.