It Took Me Three Years And It Is Done

It is finished, and the first thing you say about it is three years.

Not to anybody else. In your own head, every time you walk past it. Finished wall, three years, and the two of them arrive together and have done since the day it was done.

And nobody asked for the number. That is the thing to notice first. Nobody in this house and nobody who has visited has ever once asked how long it took, and if they did the answer would not change anything for them.

The number is attached at your end only. It is a thing you carry into the room and hand to yourself, and then the wall has to be looked at through it.

Here is what I want to put down plainly. There is a finished wall in this house, and the three years are behind it, and behind is where they are.

They are not in the paint. A wall does not carry its duration. The plaster does not know how long it waited and the room does not look like a room that took three years, because rooms do not look like anything except themselves.

You are a woman with a finished wall, and three years behind a thing has never once come off the front of it.

Establish thou the work of our hands

There is a request at the end of the ninetieth psalm, and it is worth noticing what is asked for and what is not mentioned at all.

And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it. (Psalm 90:17, King James Version)

Establish thou the work of our hands.

Establish means to make firm. To set on something. To cause a thing to stand rather than to be provisional. It is a request about the standing of a finished piece of work.

And it is asked twice in one verse, which is unusual and deliberate. The work of our hands establish thou it. Said again, in case anybody missed it.

You have a request for finished work to be made firm, and a thing established has never once been established according to how long it took. Psalm 90:17 asks for the establishing twice over, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the establishing without consulting a calendar.

And look at what the psalm has just been doing. The whole of it is about the shortness of a life and the passing of time and the years being carried away as with a flood.

That psalm knows about duration. It is the psalm that knows most about it. And at the end, when it asks for something, it asks for the work of the hands to stand, and it does not attach a single word about how long any of it took.

You were never going to have the duration attached to the asking, and a psalm that knows more about passing time than any other has never once measured a work by it. The Spirit of God is the one who establishes, and the written word spends itself on the years and then asks for the work without mentioning them.

The number is added at your end

So here is the practical claim, and it is about where a fact is being stored.

The three years are true. Nobody is going to tell you they were not three years, and this site does not do that.

What is not true is that the number is a property of the wall. It is a property of the history, and history and object are two different things, and they have been fused for so long that the fusing has stopped being visible.

You have two facts that got welded together, and a duration has never once been a feature of a finished surface. Psalm 90:17 asks for the work to be established and says nothing whatsoever about when it started, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a history from an object.

And here is the practical consequence, and it is why the assignment is about speech rather than about feeling.

The welding is maintained by a sentence. Every time that wall comes up, even silently, the sentence runs, and the sentence has two halves and always has.

Which means it can be interrupted the same way it is maintained, by saying the first half and stopping. Not by feeling differently about the three years, which is not available and is not being asked for.

You have a sentence that can be said with the first half only, and a number left off has never once been a number denied. The Spirit of God is the one present while a woman says a short true thing, and Psalm 90:17 asks for the establishing without a syllable about duration.

And one more, and this is the whole mercy of this row.

You have a finished thing that is allowed to be received tonight, and a long delay has never once had the power to disqualify what came out of it. Psalm 90:17 asks twice for the work of the hands to be made firm, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that for work that took three years and for work that took three days without distinguishing between them.

Say what is finished, and leave the number out

Here is the assignment and it is one sentence with something missing from it.

Say out loud what is finished, without naming how long it took.

The wall is done. The room is finished. The shelves are up. Whatever is true, said plainly.

You have one short sentence available tonight, and a statement about a finished thing has never once required a duration to be attached to it. Psalm 90:17 asks for the work to be established with no mention of time anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one in that room while a woman says four words.

And then let that be the whole sentence.

The second half will present itself immediately. It has been arriving for months and it will arrive again about half a second after you stop. Let it arrive and do not say it.

You have three years behind you that were never once something to be ashamed of, and a delay has never once needed to be denied in order to be left out of a sentence. The sentence simply does not need them, and they have been doing damage by riding along with it. Psalm 90:17 asks for the work to be established with no mention of time, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates the two.

Say it once. Then say it again, out loud, the same way, without the number. Twice is better than once because the second one is where it starts to sound like a sentence rather than an exercise.

Then go and do something else entirely.