Nineteen Letters and No Answer

Second Tuesday of the month. Blue paper, because you decided at the start it would always be blue paper so he would know without opening it.

You write it after breakfast. It takes about forty minutes and it has never got easier. You put in the small things, because the woman at the support group said small things are what people inside actually want. The heron that came back to the beck. What your neighbor's grandson said about the moon. That the apple tree did badly again and you cannot work out why.

You never ask him anything. Not once in nineteen letters, because a question is a debt and he has enough of those.

Nineteen months. Nothing back. Not a line, not a form, not a message through the chaplain.

Your sister said something in the kitchen at Easter that you have not been able to put down. She said, kindly, with her hands in the sink and her back to you, that you are writing to somebody who is not there any more. She said you were keeping a wound open for the sake of a boy who has made his choices.

She is his mother. That is the thing. She has more right to that sentence than you will ever have, and she has more grief in it, and she said it because she cannot bear watching you do this.

You put the stamp on anyway. Second Tuesday. Blue paper.

The instruction is remembering, and that is all it is

There is a line in Hebrews that is easy to read past because it sounds like a general sentiment.

Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.Hebrews 13:3

Look at the verb. Remember. Not rescue, not reform, not receive an answer from. The instruction terminates in the remembering, and the writer attaches no outcome to it at all.

And look at the strange second clause. As bound with them. Not from a distance, and not from above. Remember them the way you would want remembering if it were your door that locked at eight.

That is what a blue envelope on a second Tuesday is. It is not a rescue attempt. It is a woman remembering out loud, in writing, once a month, which is exactly and completely what she was asked to do.

You have already done the thing Scripture asked, nineteen times. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says remember them that are in bonds as bound with them, Hebrews 13:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary blue envelope into obedience rather than into a habit.

Your sister is not the enemy in this

Put this down before anything else: she is not against you.

She said it with her back to you at a sink, which is where people say the things that have been costing them for months. She is his mother. Every letter you send is a reminder to her of a door she cannot walk through, and she watches you get nothing back and it takes a piece out of her each time.

So we are not going to make her an opponent. There is a version of this page that arms you against your own sister, and it would be simpler and it would be poison.

What she can see is real. She can see what nineteen months of silence does to a woman. You have not been asked to choose between hearing her and going on. Scripture says faithful are the wounds of a friend, Proverbs 27:6, and the Holy Spirit is as likely to be speaking through a sister at a sink as through a verse at a kitchen table.

The part where I would tell you to stop

Let me be honest, because a page that only encourages is not much use.

If this is costing you your sleep, change it. If you are writing out of guilt, or out of a private bargain with God about what you owe a boy you used to take to the beck, say so out loud tonight and stop paying it.

If your sister needs you to write less for her own sake, that is not nothing, and love that ignores the living to be faithful to the absent has lost its footing somewhere. Scripture holds both together, Romans 12:10, and the Holy Spirit does not pit one obedience against another.

None of that is failure. Writing every other month is still writing. A card at Christmas is still remembering. You are not required to prove anything by wearing yourself out. Scripture says the Lord will not break a bruised reed, Isaiah 42:3, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over a woman with blue paper holding a tally.

The part where I stand with you

And here is the sentence I will not let stand.

He is not there any more is a thing grief says. It is not a fact. Your sister does not have that information and neither do you, and no one on this earth has ever been able to report on what does or does not reach a person in a room they are not allowed to leave.

A letter that is not answered is not a letter that did not arrive.

He has read nineteen accounts of a heron. Somebody has, at least, put nineteen blue envelopes into his hands, and whatever happened after that happened somewhere no one can see, which is precisely the condition of nearly everything that matters.

You are not sowing into nothing. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, Hebrews 6:10, and the Holy Spirit has been in every one of those forty-minute mornings whether or not a single word came back.