A Fire With No Crisis In It

Ben was asked a question at a wedding by somebody making conversation, and he has not been able to put it down since.

The man asked what he was like before.

It was an ordinary question, well meant, the sort you ask when somebody has mentioned that a situation has been going on a long time. And Ben opened his mouth to answer it and discovered, in real time, in front of a man he had met forty minutes earlier, that he did not know.

He is forty-nine. It started when he was thirty-one.

There has never been a crisis in it. That is the whole character of the thing. There is no week you could point to, no hospital, no night anybody would remember. It is simply a set of circumstances that has not changed in eighteen years and shows no sign of changing, and every year it has taken a small amount off the top of him and put nothing back.

He is not in despair. He would want that stated plainly, because people hear a description like this and reach for words that are too large. He functions. He is well thought of. He laughs at things.

But the man at the wedding asked what he was like before, and the honest answer, which he did not give, is that there is no before any more. Not in memory. Eighteen years is long enough that it has gone back and colored everything behind it, so when he reaches for who he was at twenty-nine he gets a man he has reconstructed rather than a man he remembers.

The fire has become the weather. And nobody complains about weather, and nobody brings you anything for it, and there is no version of the sentence that does not sound like ingratitude.

The thing that arrives, usually in the evening, is not a question about God and it is not anger. Ben has been past both of those for a decade.

Nobody asked me. And I have been in here on my own so long I cannot remember the outside.

You may know that wedding.

Maybe your eighteen is nine, or twenty-six. Maybe somebody asked you an ordinary question and you found out something in the middle of answering it.

What I am not going to say

Let me clear the study, because you will be checking and you are entitled to.

I am not going to tell you God has kept you in this for eighteen years for a purpose. I do not believe it, I will not write it, and if somebody has said it to you then it was wrong however kindly it was meant.

I am not going to ask what it has made of you. That is the same question in a better coat and you owe nobody an answer.

I am not going to tell you that eighteen years of endurance is beautiful. It has cost you a decade and a half of a self you cannot now locate, and any message that makes that sound noble has failed you.

And I am not going to tell you it lifts. I do not know. Eighteen years of evidence suggests you should not plan on it, and I am not going to insult you by pretending otherwise.

One thing.

Written from inside a long ruin

There is a book in the middle of the Bible that is entirely composed of somebody describing an unresolved disaster, at length, without fixing it.

And two thirds of the way through, from the middle of it, this appears.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Read where that is standing.

It is not written after. Nothing has been restored at that point in the book and nothing is restored by the end of it; the last chapter closes on an open question and a plea. This sentence is spoken by a man in the middle, with the situation exactly as it was.

And look at what it claims and what it does not.

It does not claim the ruin has meaning. It does not claim it is temporary. It claims that something arrives every morning, in quantities that have not run out, and it calls the arriving new, which means it is not stock left over from before.

And what comes to you each morning is not the remainder of something. The written word calls the compassions new every morning rather than surviving, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who cannot locate himself at twenty-nine.

And you have not been consumed, and that is not your achievement. The word says it is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, which puts the not-being-consumed on His side of the sentence, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than crediting your endurance.

The self you cannot find

Now let me take up the wedding, because I think that is the real wound and it is a strange one.

You have lost the contrast. Not the years, the contrast. There is no before to measure against, so there is no way to see the shape of what has happened, and a thing you cannot see the shape of cannot be grieved properly.

That is why you are not in despair and also not all right. Despair requires a comparison.

And I am not going to hand you back the man at twenty-nine, because I cannot and nobody can.

What I will say is that the difficulty is one of measurement, not of existence. You have not stopped being somebody because you cannot describe who you were. The record of you is not kept in your own recall.

And the account of who you are is not held in your memory. The word says thou hast searched me, and known me, and thou understandest my thought afar off, and the Spirit is the one who makes known mean known rather than approximately reconstructed.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who could not answer an ordinary question at a wedding.