The pear tree at the bottom of the garden has flowered four times since they started asking, and she has counted every one of them.
She did not set out to count. The first spring it was simply a pretty thing at the end of a hard winter and she stood at the sink and thought, well, that is nice. The second spring she noticed she was thinking about the first one. By the third she had stopped pretending, and this year the blossom came out on a Tuesday in the middle of April and she watched it happen from the window with a tea towel in her hand and did not say anything to anybody about it, and that silence is the whole of what this message is about.
Because there is no calendar for this. That is the particular cruelty of it. Other hard things have shape. A course has an end date. An illness has a next appointment. Even grief, terrible as it is, has a direction and a first anniversary and people who write to you on it. This has no anniversary, because nothing happened. There is only a running total that nobody else is keeping and no page anywhere on which it is written down.
They have been kind about it. That is the other thing. The kindness is real and it is also its own weight, because after a while you find you are managing other people's hope for you on top of your own. Somebody at church still says any news? with their whole face lit up. Somebody else has stopped asking, which is worse. And in between, you have quietly become the person who does the sums at a christening and then goes and helps with the washing up so that nobody has to see you do the sums.
If you are the one holding this, I am not going to hand you a date. I do not have one and nobody who tells you they do is telling you the truth. What I have is something better than a date, and it is going to sound small until you look at it properly.
Somebody has been keeping the record
Start with the thing you are most afraid is true, because until it is dealt with nothing else can get in.
You are afraid the silence means absence. That the asking has gone up into nothing, that after four springs the reasonable conclusion is that nobody is receiving it, and that the ache you have carried quietly to the sink every April has not been noticed by anyone at all.
Here is the answer to that, and it is one verse, and it is oddly specific.
You count my wanderings. You put my tears into your bottle. Aren't they in your book?Psalm 56:8
Sit in the strangeness of that image for a second, because familiarity has worn it smooth and it is not a smooth thing.
Tears in a bottle. Not tears wiped away, not tears explained, not tears fixed. Collected. Kept. The picture is of somebody bending down beside a weeping person, catching what falls, and keeping it, because it is worth keeping. And then the line about the book, which is not a poetic flourish either. It is a record. Written down. Entered.
Now look at who wrote it and where he was. This is David, and the note at the head of that psalm places it when the Philistines took hold of him in Gath, which is to say a man in real danger, in enemy hands, with no date on his deliverance and no guarantee that it was coming at all. He is not writing from the other side with the ending in hand. He is writing in it. And what he reaches for, in it, is not a promise about next week. It is the fact that his tears are being counted.
That is what is on offer to you tonight. Not a calendar. A witness.
And I want you to feel the difference, because it is the whole difference. A calendar tells you when the pain ends. A witness tells you that the pain is not disappearing into nothing while it lasts. Every month you did not mention. Every test result read in a car park. Every time you put your face back on before going into a room. All of it counted, and none of it lost, by a God who was not looking somewhere else.
You have not been asking into an empty room. You have been asking into a record.
And let me say plainly the thing shame has been whispering in the quiet, because it needs killing rather than managing. This is not a verdict on you. It is not a judgement, not a withholding, not a message, not a consequence of anything you did or did not believe hard enough. Nobody in this house is going to hand you that sentence, and if anybody has handed it to you, it was not from God and you are free to set it down. We carry that weight here. You do not.
So bring it again. That is the whole turn, and I know how tired that sentence can sound, so let me say exactly what I mean by it.
You have most likely stopped asking properly. Not out of unbelief, but out of self protection, because hope has cost you something every single time and there is a point at which a person quietly starts praying smaller in order to survive their own longing. You have started asking for the strength to accept it rather than for the thing itself. And that instinct is understandable and it is not a sin, and it is also not the place to stay, because it slowly moves God from being the One you ask into being the One you brace against.
Ask again. Out loud, in plain words, without the softening clause you have been adding at the end. He is not going to be startled by it and He is not scoring your delivery.
And then leave the outcome exactly where it belongs. God may answer this in His own way and in His timing, and I am not going to tell you what that will look like, because nobody was authorized to promise you that. What I can tell you is what is yours right now, tonight, with nothing on the calendar: you are seen, you are counted, you are held, and the waiting is not silence.
And on the ordinary, practical side of it, hear me warmly. If you are seeing a clinic, keep seeing them. If there are tests, have them. If there is treatment in front of you and it is right for you, take it, and take it without a shred of guilt, because skill and medicine are among God's kindest gifts and He is not competing with a nurse. Nothing in this message asks you to loosen your grip on any care that is in your hands. Receive with both hands.
Declare this over yourself
Say it with your hand on the page. You are allowed to speak this way because you are in Christ, and that standing is yours in the years that answer and the years that do not. And say it with an open hand on the outcome: God may answer this in His own way and in His timing, the outcome is His, and a longer wait is never a verdict on you.
- Longing, you are not evidence that God has forgotten. The Word of God says He counts my wanderings and puts my tears into His bottle, so every month I never told anyone about is written down by Someone who was not looking away. Silence, you are not the same thing as absence, in the name of Jesus.
- Date I do not have, you do not get to be my proof of anything. God has put no deadline on Himself and I am putting none on Him, and I am held in a wait that is not empty air. The God who sees me is not a God who mislays the ones He sees.
- Lord, You are the God who keeps my tears in a bottle and my name in Your book, and I am not a case You have shelved. I bring You the asking again today, plainly and without shame, and I receive Your nearness now, which is the thing I cannot do without. I thank You, because You are with me in this, and being seen by You is not a consolation prize.
Psalm 56:8
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
