Waiting For Him To Come Back

The hymn comes through the wall.

She is out in the car park because the last one always undoes her, and out here it arrives muffled, so you get the shape of it and none of the words. It is the low part she can hear best through brick, the part underneath, and that is the part he used to sing.

Eleven years now.

He is not a bad man. She wants that said first and she says it first every time, to her sister, to the woman at the prayer group, to herself in the car. He gets up at five. He does the bins and the school run and he took her father to every single appointment, all thirty of them, and never once mentioned it afterwards. When her friend was widowed it was him who went round and rehung the door that had been sticking since the funeral.

He is just not there any more. Something came apart for him around the time of the business, and there was a man at that church who said a thing to him that she still cannot repeat without her face going hot, and after that he stopped going, and then he stopped talking about it, and now he says nothing at all when the subject comes near.

So on a Sunday he makes her a flask of tea for the drive, and puts it in her hand at the door, and says have a nice time, love. And she cries about that more than she cries about the empty seat, because it is kind, and kindness is harder to argue with than a fight would be.

She has prayed for him every day for eleven years. She has a way of doing it now that has gone quiet and slightly worn, like a coat you keep because it still keeps the rain off.

And last Tuesday, in the middle of the washing up, she caught herself thinking: what if I do this until one of us dies.

She has not said that out loud to anybody. Neither have you, I expect, and yet here you are standing in a car park in your own life listening to the low part of a hymn through a wall.

Whose job you have been doing

There is a sentence in Paul's letter to Rome that I want to put in your hands this morning, because it names the thing that actually moves a person, and it takes an enormous weight off your back.

Or do you despise the riches of His kindness and His long patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?Romans 2:4

Read what leads a person home.

Not an argument. Not a good point made at the right moment in a car. Not being caught out, not being outlasted in a discussion, not a well aimed sermon left on the arm of the sofa. Kindness. God's own kindness, and God's own long patience, which is a thing the verse treats as riches, as though patience were treasure and not delay.

Now put your last eleven years beside that.

Because somewhere around the fourth year, without ever agreeing to it, you took on a job that was never yours. You became responsible for a man's soul. You started weighing every sentence before you said it, in case it was the wrong one. You stopped mentioning things. You mentioned things and regretted it for a week. You have run whole conversations in advance in the car, and you have prayed prayers that were really strategies, and underneath all of it has been a fear you would never say in company: that if he does not come back, some part of that is down to how you handled it.

Put that down. It was never yours to carry, and the reason is not that your love is small. It is that a human will is the one thing God Himself does not force, and He is not asking you to do a thing He declines to do.

He knocks. He waits. That is His own way with people, and if He will not batter a door down then neither of us is going to talk you into battering one.

So here is where the authority you have actually been given points, because you do have it, and you have been aiming it at the wrong thing.

You are in Christ, and Christ is in you, and that means you have real authority in this house. It is authority over the fear that runs your Sundays. Over the discouragement that has been getting the last word for years. Over the silence between two people who love each other, and over the atmosphere of your own home, which is more than you think it is. What you do not have, and never had, and cannot ask for, is authority over his will. Contending is one thing and controlling is another, and they look similar from the outside while facing in exactly opposite directions.

And hear this, because you have half believed the opposite for a long time. The delay is not a verdict on you. Not on your faith, not on your prayers, not on whether you are the sort of wife who should have managed this by now. There is no ledger anywhere in heaven with your name at the top and eleven years of failure underneath it.

Nor is there a date. I will not give you one, and I will not let you give God one either, because a deadline is not faith, it is a way of setting yourself up to be devastated on a Tuesday. What is true today is that He has not forgotten either of you, and that He is at work in rooms you are not permitted to enter, in a life He values even more than you do, which is saying a great deal.

And let me name the ache under the waiting, because nobody has. You are lonely in a marriage you love. You have anniversaries nobody else marks: the last Sunday he came, the year he stopped saying grace. You are frightened about time. And there are days you resent him for it and then feel wicked for the resentment, and you have never once said that to another person. Say it to God this morning, plainly. He is not shocked, and He has been waiting for you to bring Him the true one rather than the tidy one.