Four Years of Saying Fine

The clippers stop mid pass, the way they do six or seven times a haircut, and in the gap you can hear the little radio on the shelf and two men behind him arguing cheerfully about a match that finished on Tuesday. Four chairs along the wall, all of them full. A kid is turning slowly on the empty second chair and being comprehensively ignored. Somebody's phone has been going off in a coat pocket for a while and nobody is claiming it.

The barber has cut his hair for nine years. He knows the shape of his head and roughly the shape of his life, and he asks the way he always asks, while tilting it forward with two fingers.

"So? How is it all going?"

He answers into his own chest, because his chin is down.

"Good. Yeah. All good."

Then the chin comes up and there they both are in the mirror, and he watches himself smile at his own face while the word settles. The clippers start again. The men behind carry on about Tuesday. It is not a lie he has to build any more; it arrives fully assembled, with the smile already attached, and by the time the cape is shaken out it will be gone from the room entirely and only he will still be holding it.

And you know exactly what he is holding, because you are holding it too. You have a word like that. You have a chair like that, somewhere, where a kind person asks the ordinary question and you give the answer that keeps the afternoon easy for everybody. Somebody who loves you asked how it was going, and you said fine, and what you meant was I have run out of ways to say the same thing, and the room carried on being loud, and nobody noticed you had gone quiet in the middle of it.

Say the sentence you have been swallowing

Let me name the weight before I say a single word about lifting it, because a person told to cheer up in a room full of music has just been handed a second thing to carry. Scripture is not embarrassed by that sentence, Isaiah 40:27, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a tidier version of it.

Here is the weight, and it is not the lack. You could carry the lack. It is that the lack has stopped being an event and turned into furniture. Nobody asks about furniture. There was a season when people knew, and prayed, and checked in, and that season ended, and the thing itself did not end with it. So you stopped raising it, because raising it makes a face happen. You know the face. Kindness with a little tiredness underneath it. You spare people the face, and you tell the barber it is all good, and the clippers start again.

And underneath the word fine is a sentence you have never once said out loud. Let me say it for you, so that you are not the one who has to say it first. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Isaiah 40:27-28, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

My way is hidden from the Lord.

Now look at who put that sentence in the Bible.

Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the LORD, and my judgment is passed over from my God? Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding.Isaiah 40:27-28

God wrote the complaint down. He did not wait for a tidier version of it. He put the whole raw shape of it into the text, in the first person, in the mouth of His own people: my way is hid, my case has been passed over. That is somebody saying God looked at their ground and moved on. And it is in the Book, unedited, which means the sentence you have been swallowing for four years has already been said out loud once by a whole nation, and heaven did not flinch. Scripture holds that ground in Isaiah 40:27-28, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

Then hear what He calls the man. O Jacob, and O Israel. Both names, in one breath, in the same sentence. Jacob is the name he arrived with, the one that means he came out of the womb holding his brother's heel, the name that was an accusation and was accurate. Israel is the name he was given in the dark by the river, after a fight he did not win cleanly and walked away from with a limp that never healed. God says both. He does not withdraw the second name because the man is complaining, and He does not pretend the first one never happened.

Four years of fine has not cost you your name. He still says both.

And here is where I have to be careful, because this is the exact place where writing about a long wait goes wrong.

He does not explain it.

There is no reason given. No lesson, no diagnosis, no here is what I am doing in this. What He offers instead is Himself: the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth, who fainteth not, neither is weary. And then the door shuts firmly on the question: there is no searching of his understanding.

So I am not going to hand you a reason. I do not have one, and a reason handed to somebody in year four is almost always another person's guess dressed up in robes. What the verse actually says is enough to stand on. God has not grown tired of your ground while you were growing tired of your ground. He has not become weary of the asking. He has not developed the face. This rests on Scripture in Isaiah 40:27-28, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

And you are allowed to speak in this. Not as a technique and not as a lever. Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to the mountain, is enough, and He said it to ordinary people with nothing much in their hands. He did not say beg the mountain. He said speak to it. The mountain in this room is not your lack. The mountain is a suspicion four years thick that your case has been passed over, and that suspicion is exactly the kind of thing a person in Christ has been given standing to speak to. Scripture already said it in Isaiah 40:27-28, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.