He Relapsed on the Fourth of the Month

Ten past eleven and the house has gone quiet in the particular way it goes quiet afterwards.

One lamp. The other chair.

The call came at about four. It was not him, it was the other one, the friend, who is decent and who rings her rather than letting her find out, and who always starts the same way, which is: he is all right, first, before anything else, because he knows.

Fourth of the month. It has been the fourth twice now, which means nothing, and she has noticed it anyway.

Nineteen months this time. Nineteen. He had the flat and the job at the yard and he had come for lunch twice in July and had sat in that chair and been funny about somebody at work, and she had thought, and she is ashamed of this, that they were through the worst of it.

She has done everything. She wants that on the record in her own head because nobody says it out loud. She did the course. She read the book the woman at church gave her and then read a better one. She stopped giving him money in the second year, which cost her more than anybody knows, and she held that line even in the December. She has been to the group. She has prayed over that boy every morning since he was three days old and she has not missed a week in thirty one years.

And the phone went at four.

She is not crying now. That was earlier and it was short. Now she is just sitting in a quiet front room with one lamp on, and the thing in her head is not even a question, it is flatter than a question.

If you have taken that call more than twice, you know that chair. And you know what sits down beside you afterwards: I do not know what a blessed life is supposed to feel like, but I am fairly sure it does not feel like this, and I have been doing this for a very long time.

The word, and the psalm they never quote to you

Let me sit in the other chair for a bit and say the plain thing, because everybody who rings tomorrow will say something else.

The problem is not the fourth. You have had worse calls than this one and you took them. The problem is that thirty one years of praying and one call at four have got into the same sentence in your head, and once they are in the same sentence there is only one place the arithmetic can go, and it goes there at about eleven at night in a quiet room.

So let me put the word straight, because on this subject it is used to wound and mostly by accident.

Blessed does not mean your son is well. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is a fact about where He is looking. It has never once been readable off somebody else's choices, and any teaching that makes a mother's blessedness depend on her adult son is not Christianity, it is cruelty with a verse attached.

Now, Psalm 34, and I want to give you the verse that lives twenty lines below the one people put on cards.

Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all.Psalm 34:19

Many. Not few. Not none. The psalm says many, about the righteous, flatly, as an expectation.

That psalm is the one that also says taste and see that the Lord is good, and blessed is the man that trusteth in him, and it is the same poem, and the same pen, and about twenty verses apart. Nobody ever reads you both halves in the same conversation.

You are inside the half of that psalm that gets left out, and the psalm itself puts both halves in one poem about the same people. Psalm 34:19 says many afflictions of the righteous without softening it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is able to hand a person the whole psalm rather than the verse that fitted somebody's card.

Out of them all is not the same as instead of them

Now the second half of that verse, because it is precise and people blunt it.

The Lord delivereth him out of them all.

Out of. Not from. The psalm does not say the righteous are kept away from the afflictions. It says they are brought out of them, which is a sentence that requires you to have been in.

And there is no timescale in it, and there is no promise that any particular one ends by a particular Tuesday, and it does not say the deliverance always looks like the thing you asked for. It says the Lord does the bringing out, and it says all, and it says nothing about when.

That is a much harder promise than the one on the card and it is the one that is actually true, and it is the only one that could be said honestly to a woman in your chair.

You have a God who brings people out of things rather than around them, and out of requires being in first. Psalm 34:19 says out of them all rather than from any of them, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the earnest of an inheritance, a deposit on an outcome that is not being paid in monthly installments a mother can audit.

And I want to say the thing about your thirty one years, because it needs saying by somebody.

Prayer is not a mechanism that converts years into outcomes. If it were, then every praying mother whose child is well would be a better woman than every praying mother whose child is not, and you know that is obscene, and you would say so about anybody else in about four seconds.

You have not failed at anything, and thirty one years of praying has not been an account that has come back short. Scripture puts the afflictions and the deliverance in one verse about the righteous, and it is His Spirit who is described as interceding for us with groanings, which means the praying in this house has had somebody else's voice under it the whole time.

What I will not say to you tonight

Now let me be honest, because tomorrow four people will not be.

I am not going to tell you this is the last time. I do not know. I do not know whether nineteen months means something or nothing and neither does anybody who tells you either way with confidence.

I am not going to tell you God is doing something in him through this. He might be. I have no way of knowing that and saying it would make a relapse into an instrument, and I will not do that to your son or to you.

And I am not going to tell you that if you had done something differently. Nobody is going to say that to you tonight and I am not going to imply it either, and I want to say plainly that the second year, when you stopped, was the right thing, and holding it in the December was the right thing, and it cost you something nobody has ever thanked you for.

Both halves. This is not the withdrawal of His favor and it is not His favor in disguise.

You are favored and the phone went at four, and neither one of those is evidence about the other. The written word puts many afflictions and full deliverance in one line without explaining the gap, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a woman able to hold that at eleven at night in a quiet front room.

And one plain thing. Ring the friend back tomorrow and thank him for ringing you first. And if you are not sleeping, or if this has gone somewhere darker than tired, say it out loud to your own doctor. You are the second person in this and nobody has ever told you that either.