He Started It And I Cannot Look At It

There are pencil marks on the wood.

Faint ones, in his handwriting, the little ticks and numbers a man makes when he is working something out and does not intend anybody to read them afterward.

That is why the job is still standing there. Not because it is difficult. Not because you could not learn it or pay somebody to come and do it in an afternoon.

Because the pencil marks are the last handwriting there is, and a finished job does not have pencil marks on it.

And somewhere along the way, in among everything else, you started filing this under the same heading as everything else you have not done. The dishwasher. The mail. The thing in the spare room. And that filing is wrong, and it has been costing you.

That is not procrastination sitting in your house. That is grief, standing exactly where somebody left it, doing the thing grief does, which is to hold still.

You are a woman standing in front of grief and not in front of a chore, and the reason you cannot look at that has never once been laziness.

The Lord is nigh unto them

There is a line in the psalms that does not offer a solution, and that is exactly why it is the right one.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18, King James Version)

The LORD is nigh unto them.

Nigh. Near. Not fixing, not removing, not hurrying anybody along. Near, which is a word about position rather than about outcome, and it is the whole of what is offered in that line.

And the condition for it is not strength. The condition is a broken heart, which is to say the qualification for this particular nearness is the exact state that disqualifies a person from almost everything else.

You have a nearness available that asks nothing of you first, and a broken heart has never once been the thing that put you outside it. Psalm 34:18 names the broken heart as the place where the nearness lands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is near a woman in a house that still has his pencil marks in it.

And notice what is absent. There is no timetable. Nobody is told how long is reasonable. The verse does not say the Lord is nigh for a season, or until you are back on your feet, or so long as you are making progress.

Nearness without a deadline is a very rare thing to be handed, and it is sitting in that line unclaimed.

You were never given a deadline on this, and the nearness in that verse has never once been conditional on how you are coming along. The Spirit of God is the one who stays near without measuring the pace, and Psalm 34:18 attaches no term at all to the word nigh.

The filing error is the thing that hurts

So here is the practical part, and it is about a category rather than about a job.

Every week that unfinished work sits on the same mental list as the recycling and the light bulb in the hall. It goes on the list. It does not get done. And at the end of the week it sits there as one more item not crossed off, and it quietly feeds a sentence that gets said about the woman who lives here.

But it is not the same kind of item. Not remotely. The recycling is undone because of time. That is undone because his handwriting is on it.

You are carrying one item on that list that was never the same species as the others, and it has never once belonged beside a light bulb. Psalm 34:18 speaks to the broken hearted specifically and not to the disorganized, and the Holy Spirit is the one who files a thing correctly when a tired woman cannot.

And here is what the misfiling costs, because it is not only inaccurate, it is expensive.

Filed as a chore, the only available responses are discipline, guilt and a plan. None of those touch grief. So the plan fails, and the failure gets added to the account, and now there are two things in the house instead of one.

You have been applying the wrong tool to it for a long while, and a plan that failed on that job was never once a measure of your seriousness. The Spirit of God is the one who knows the difference between a woman who is disorganized and a woman who is bereaved, and the written word puts the nearness exactly where the break is.

Ten minutes, and do not touch it

Here is the assignment, and it asks for less than anything else in the house does.

Go and sit down within reach of it. A chair, the floor, the step, whatever is there. Close enough to put a hand on it without standing up.

And then do not put a hand on it.

Ten minutes. Do not clean it, do not measure anything, do not decide what to do with it, and do not decide what to do with it later either, which is the same decision in a delayed coat.

You have ten minutes available tonight that require nothing from your hands, and sitting beside a thing has never once committed you to finishing it. Psalm 34:18 offers nearness and asks for no progress in exchange, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sits with a woman in a room where nothing at all gets done.

And if you cry, that is what the ten minutes are for, and if you do not, that is fine too, and neither one of those is the result you are aiming at.

There is no result. That is the unusual mercy in this particular assignment.