Six Years and He Walked In

He is asleep in the back room. You have been up twice to check, which is a thing you have not done since he was small.

Wednesday. He rang from the station and you had the phone in your hand before it finished the first ring, because you have had the phone in your hand before it finished the first ring for six years and your body has not been told it can stop.

He came in with one bag. He looked older and thinner and he laughed at something in the hall, and it was his actual laugh, the one from before, and you had to turn round and put the kettle on.

Everybody has said the same thing since Thursday. Your sister said it twice. Your neighbor said it over the fence with her hands together. You must be so happy.

You are. That is not the confusing part. You are happy in a way that has taken the floor out from under you and you are not able to describe it to a single person.

The confusing part is that at eleven o'clock, with him asleep down the hall, you are sitting at this kitchen table doing something that is not thanking God.

You are counting. Six Christmases. Two funerals he was not at. The winter your knee went. The Sunday you got up and got dressed and sat back down on the bed and did not go.

He is home, and there is a stack of years on this table that has nowhere to go.

The psalm counts the watches

There is a psalm about waiting written by somebody who is clearly awake.

I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.Psalm 130:5-6

He says it twice. That is not an accident of style. He says more than they that watch for the morning, and then he says I say, more than they that watch for the morning, because once was not enough to carry what he meant.

The watchmen are the comparison. Men on a wall through the night, whose whole job is to keep looking at a horizon that is not doing anything yet. He says his waiting was heavier than theirs.

That is a man counting his own watches out loud in front of God, and Scripture keeps it in.

You are not doing something wrong by counting at a kitchen table. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture repeats the line about watching for the morning because the waiting was that heavy, Psalm 130:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman name the weight of six years without it costing her the gladness.

Nobody gets to say it was worth it except you

Somebody will say it this week. They will mean it beautifully. It was all worth it in the end.

And something in you will go still, and you will smile, and you will not be able to say why it landed wrong.

Here is why. That judgement belongs to the woman who sat down on the bed and did not go to church that Sunday, and to nobody else on this earth. When a person says it on your behalf they have taken the one thing those six years left in your hands, which is the right to say what they were.

So I am not going to say it. I do not know whether it was worth it and neither does your neighbor over the fence.

You are the only one with standing to weigh those years, and you may take as long as you like. Scripture lets Job speak about his own suffering for whole chapters without cutting him off, Job 3:1-3, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a summary before He would sit down with somebody.

The homecoming is not a payment

Here is the arithmetic that has your chest tight with your son asleep down the hall.

You have started treating Wednesday as a settlement. Six years in one column, a young man in a back room in the other, books balanced, everybody can move on now.

That is not what happened, and it is a cruel sum to be running on yourself at eleven at night. Scripture keeps gift and endurance in separate hands, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit has never once presented a mother with an invoice.

The six years were not an installment plan. Wednesday is not a reimbursement. They are not the same currency and they were never in one ledger, and treating them as a transaction is exactly what is stopping the gladness reaching you.

You are not being paid out, you are being given something. Scripture says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a mother her son back as a receipt.

The body takes longer than the news

And then there is the plain physical part, which almost nobody warns anybody about.

Six years taught you one job, and you got very good at it. Do not hope too far. Do not spend anything on an expectation. Have the phone in your hand before it finishes ringing.

That did not switch off on Wednesday. It cannot. It has not been told, and it will not take instruction from a doorbell.

That is why you have been up twice to check he is there. It is not anxiety and it is not ingratitude. It is a woman whose guard has been up for six years, and the lowering of it is a process rather than a decision.

You are whole now, on this side of it, whatever your chest is doing tonight. Scripture says He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds, Psalm 147:3, and the Holy Spirit does that binding at His own pace and never at the pace of the neighbors.