She Cannot Tell Which She Wants

The phone went at half past nine on a Tuesday. Unknown number.

And for about two seconds she thought: this might be her.

She has played those two seconds back more times than she can count, and not because of the hope in them.

Because of what she felt when the voice turned out to be a survey about broadband.

She was relieved.

Her shoulders came down. She sat back on the sofa. And then she sat there for about ten minutes with the phone in her hand feeling like somebody who had just been shown something about herself she did not want.

She has not said that sentence out loud to anybody. She is not going to. What kind of woman keeps a place set for four years and feels her shoulders drop when it turns out not to be her?

Here is the thing she cannot get to fit.

She wants her back. That is true. It is not a performance and she is not lying to herself about it.

And something else is also true and it lives underneath the first thing: she has slept better these four years than she did in the six before them.

Both of those are true at once, in one woman, and there does not appear to be room in a person for both.

If that is you, come and sit down. The curtains are half drawn and nobody in this room is going to be shocked.

What the psalm permits

There is a verse about bringing things to God, and the important word in it is the one that is missing.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. Selah.Psalm 62:8

Pour out your heart.

Not pour out the acceptable part of your heart. Not sort it into what may be brought and what must be dealt with privately first. Not present the version of yourself that a woman who keeps a place set is supposed to have.

Pour out your heart, and then the refuge is named, and the refuge is on the far side of the pouring rather than a reward for arriving tidy.

The psalms are full of people saying things to God that would empty a room. That is not a defect in the psalms. It is the point of them.

You are permitted to bring the relief to God exactly as it is, and Scripture put no filter between the pouring and the refuge. Psalm 62:8 says pour out your heart before him and names God as the refuge in the same breath, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the psalms full of unedited speech rather than presentable prayer, which means the sentence you have not said out loud has somewhere to go tonight.

Both things are true

Now let us actually deal with the contradiction, because it is not one.

The relief is not about her. It is about what living near her cost.

Those six years took something out of you daily, and your body remembers the cost even where your heart does not agree with it. When the phone rang, the part of you that got tired for six years answered first, before any of the rest of you could get there.

That is not a verdict on your love. It is a report from your nervous system about a real expense.

Love and exhaustion are not opposites and they are not in competition. A person can want somebody back with everything they have and also be genuinely rested by their absence, and both readings are accurate, because they are measuring different things.

You are not two-faced, you are two things at once, and one of them is a body that remembers what it cost. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust, and it treats human limits as understood rather than as accusations, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things of God and of a person, which means what surfaced in those two seconds was already known and already accounted for.

Nobody is being summoned

Let us be plain, because a woman carrying this needs it plain.

Nobody here is telling you to contact her. And nobody here is telling you that discovering the relief means you should have gone to her sooner, or that it is a sign of anything you need to correct.

There is nothing to fix in this. There is something to say out loud, and that is different.

You are not being instructed to reach anybody, and four years of distance is not being read as a fault of yours. Romans 12:18 says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, and it writes both limits into a single sentence rather than issuing a bare command, and it is the same Spirit who bears witness with your spirit, which means what those six years cost you is inside the accounting.