The Question That Comes Round Every Year

It comes at about the second cup, after the plates have gone out and before anybody has moved.

It is always the same aunt. It is always kindly meant, and there is nothing in it but love, and if you told that woman what this costs she would be devastated, and she would never do it again, and something in that would be worse.

She puts her hand over the top of hers, and she asks how it is going.

She has been asking for eleven years.

The answer is smooth now. It has been worn down like a stone in a river, and it comes out easily, and it is warm and it is honest as far as it goes and it closes the subject without anybody feeling closed off. It takes about fourteen seconds. She has never once had to say it twice.

Nobody at that table has ever heard the real answer.

Here is the part she has told nobody.

She starts getting ready for it in September.

Not consciously at first. It arrives as a kind of weather. Some time in the early autumn there is a heaviness in the way she thinks about December, and it took her about four years to work out what it was attached to, and now she knows, and knowing has not helped, because she still starts in September.

She has sat in the car outside afterward twice. Both times with the engine off and her hands in her lap, for about ten minutes, and then she has driven home and been fine.

And she wants it understood that she is not angry with that woman. Not one bit. She loves her, and the asking is the love, and a year where nobody asked would be a year where everybody had stopped hoping alongside her, and she does not want that either.

There is just nowhere in the whole thing where the true number gets said.

If there is a question that comes round for you every year, pull up a chair. Nobody at this end of the table is going to ask you anything.

A prophet put it at the top of the page

There is a book in the Bible that opens with a complaint, and the position of it is the whole point.

O Lord, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!Habakkuk 1:2

That is verse two. Not a low moment in the middle of chapter three. Not something confessed later and repented of.

It is at the top of the page, in the first breath of a book of Scripture, and it is the man's own words to God.

Nobody edited it. Nobody added a line before it explaining that of course he did not really mean it. It stands where he put it, and every generation since has read the book by walking through that sentence first.

You are asking a thing a prophet put in the first line of a book God kept. Habakkuk 1:2 opens with how long shall I cry and thou wilt not hear, and the Holy Spirit preserved that as the doorway into the whole prophecy rather than as a lapse tucked away in the middle, which means the question you have never said out loud at that table is the question Scripture chose to open with.

Nobody is going to tell you to hope harder

Let us be clear about what will not be asked of you here, because the bracing starts at the first paragraph and has a cost all of its own.

Nobody is going to tell you to hope harder. Nobody is going to explain to you what eleven years is for, or hurry you into the second half of a verse before the first half has been allowed to sit there.

You are not being charged with anything, and the sickness in your chest has never once been read as unbelief. Proverbs 13:12 says hope deferred maketh the heart sick and simply stops, with no advice and no correction attached to that clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it in that order, which means a long deferral producing exactly what you carry is what the word says happens to a person.

Not to a weak person. To a person.

The smooth answer is not a lie

Now the fourteen seconds, because it has started getting called dishonest and it is not.

That answer protects a woman who loves you from a weight she did not ask for and could not put down afterward. It keeps a table warm at a gathering that people look forward to all year. It is quick, it is kind, and every word in it is true as far as it reaches.

The trouble with it is not that it is false. It is that it is the only version there is, and a person needs one place where the whole number gets said.

You were being kind at your own expense for eleven years, and that has never once been filed under dishonesty. Proverbs 14:10 says the heart knoweth his own bitterness and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy, and it is written as a plain observation about how people are made rather than as an accusation, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things and has read the whole answer every year while the table heard the short one.