Eleven Years On The Same Card

It is taped inside the left hand cupboard, at eye level, over the mugs.

It was written on a Wednesday in a hospital relatives' room by a woman she has not seen since, on the back of a card that had a printed picture of a bridge on the front, which she has always found slightly funny and has never mentioned to anybody.

Eleven years.

That verse got her through the whole of the first year, which she does not talk about, and most of the second, which was in some ways worse. She said it in a corridor. She said it in a car with her hands still on the wheel in a car park at the retail place, twice. She said it out loud at four in the morning with her forehead against the cupboard door it is taped inside.

It is the only thing that stayed steady in a period when nothing else did.

On Tuesday she opened that cupboard, took a mug out, said the whole verse under her breath, and shut the door.

And halfway through pouring the kettle she realized she had said it the way you say a phone number.

That is when it started, and it has been going since. She has begun to wonder whether the card has become furniture. Whether it means anything any more or whether she is a woman who says a slogan at a cupboard eleven times a week. Whether something that once split a night open can wear out.

She has thought about taking it down. Not throwing it away. Putting it in a drawer, which she recognizes as a softer version of the same thing.

She has not done it. The tape has gone yellow.

The grass withereth. The word does not.

Stand at the cupboard a minute, because the verse you were given is itself about what lasts, and it draws the line in a place that answers your Tuesday exactly, and the Holy Spirit had it written down long before a woman copied it onto a card.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.Isaiah 40:8

Two things in that sentence and one of them is fading in front of you.

The grass. The flower. The living, vivid, sensory thing, which is beautiful and which is going, and Isaiah does not say it is bad. He says it fades, which is what it does.

And then the other, which does not.

Now, what faded on Tuesday? Not the word. Your sense of it. The freshness, the catch in the chest, the thing that made it split a night open in the second year.

That is the flower. It was real, and it did its work, and it fades, and the verse you have had taped up for eleven years is the one sentence in Scripture that told you in advance that it would.

Hear this at the cupboard door. You are not holding a slogan, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture separates what fades from what stands and puts the word on the standing side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who made it stand under you in a corridor and a car park and at four in the morning, and He has not withdrawn it because it stopped tasting of anything.

Now let me name what Tuesday actually proved, because you have read it as a loss and it is the opposite.

You said the whole verse under your breath, correctly, without looking, while taking a mug out of a cupboard and thinking about something else.

Eleven years ago you could not have done that. Eleven years ago that sentence had to be read off a card by a woman whose hands were not working properly, in a room she cannot remember the color of.

It is now in you at the level a phone number is in you, which is the level things live at when they are never going to be lost.

That is not decay. That is the completion of the thing the card was for.

Hear this too, and let it stop the drawer. You have not worn it out, and Scripture is what says so. What is written says the word stands for ever, which is a longer period than eleven years, and the Spirit of God does not attach the standing of a sentence to the intensity of your reaction to it.

And now the tape, which has gone yellow, and which is my favorite thing in this whole story.

That tape has been holding a piece of card in a kitchen through eleven years of ordinary life. It did not glow. It did not do anything you noticed. It just held.

You have wanted the verse to keep feeling like the night it saved you. But a thing that saved you once and then quietly held for eleven years has not failed at anything. It has done the harder half of the job, which nobody writes songs about, and the written word promised standing rather than sensation, and the Holy Spirit has done the holding.