What Her Daughters Heard Her Say

She said it at this table, with all three of them sitting round it.

She remembers where each of them was. The eldest with her back to the window. The middle one on the end, half up already because she is always half up. The youngest across from her with both elbows on the wood, the way she has sat since she was four.

And she told them that God had told her, and she told them what, and then she said the words this year.

The eldest wrote it down. That is the detail that gets her at two in the morning. Her eldest daughter, who is not a woman given to writing things down, took out that little book she keeps and wrote it in.

The year went all the way round.

And nothing came. There was no dramatic day, no moment where it visibly did not happen. It simply ran out, the way a year does, quietly, in December, with the house full and the radio on and nobody saying anything.

Nobody has brought it up since. Not one of them, not once, and they are not shy women.

Here is what she has never said to anybody.

She does not talk about God in that kitchen any more.

She prays. She prays in the car and at the sink and walking to the shop, she says His name a hundred times a day where nobody can hear it. But in that kitchen, at that table, in front of those three, her mouth closes. She will talk about anything else. And when one of them mentions church, or says something is a blessing, she agrees warmly and changes the subject, and she is very good at it, and she hates it.

If there is a room where your mouth closes, and people in it who love you, pull out a chair. The pot is on.

The verse that puts the shame somewhere else

There is a line about hope that most people quote for the warm half and skip past the load-bearing half.

And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.Romans 5:5

Read the first clause as a flat statement of fact, because that is what it is.

Hope does not put a person to shame. That is not encouragement, it is a ruling. Whatever it is that has been sitting on you in that kitchen for a year, the word says it did not come from having hoped.

And look at what it puts underneath the ruling. Not your track record. Not whether the thing arrived. The love of God, poured out, by the Holy Ghost, already given.

You are a woman who hoped out loud, and the word says plainly that hoping is not the thing that shames anybody. Romans 5:5 grounds that ruling in the love of God shed abroad by the Holy Spirit rather than in an outcome, which means the year running out in December had no power to convert your hope into a disgrace.

What actually happened at that table

Something went wrong. Let us say it once, properly, instead of doing what the family has done, which is to be kind about it by saying nothing.

The year was wrong.

The love was not wrong. The wanting for your daughters to have something to stand on was not wrong. Saying it out loud in front of them was not wrong, and it was the bravest thing anybody did at that table that day.

The year was wrong, and the year is the one piece of the whole thing that was never handed to you to hold.

You have a faith that came out of that December intact and a date that was never issued to you. The word puts the times and the seasons in the Father's own power in Acts 1:7 and leaves them there, and the Spirit who carries that verse has never once passed a calendar across a kitchen table, so the part of that sentence that failed was the year, and your believing walked out of the room unharmed.

Timing, not faith. Say it over the pot. Timing, not faith.

The eldest wrote it down

Now the little book, because that is the two in the morning problem and it deserves better than being avoided.

Your daughter took out a book and wrote down what her mother said God had said.

You have been reading that as evidence stored up. A record of the day you were wrong, in your own child's handwriting, in a drawer somewhere in her house. Try it the other way round for a minute.

You were being believed by your own daughter, and a woman who is not believed does not get written down. Malachi 3:16 says a book of remembrance was written for them that feared the Lord and thought upon His name, and it is the same Spirit who moves a person to write a thing down rather than let it go by, which means what is in that little book is a record of a mother her daughter took seriously.

She did not write it down to catch you. She wrote it down because when her mother speaks about God she does not want to lose it.