The Keys in My Hand and I Cried

The woman at the office put them in your hand and said congratulations and you said thank you in a voice that came out fine.

Then you drove over and let yourself in and stood in the hallway, and it was completely empty and it smelled of paint and somebody else's life, and you cried for about four minutes standing up with your coat on.

It was not the crying anybody was expecting.

Eight years. Four addresses. Two moves you did not choose and one you did. The nine months in your mother's back bedroom with a five year old and a cot. The landlord in the second place who was fine until he was not. The Christmas in the flat with the boiler.

You have wanted this so specifically, for so long, that you had a mental picture of the hallway moment and had been carrying it around for years.

And you got there and what came up was not the picture.

What came up was the back bedroom at your mother's. What came up was the phone call about the second place, and the way you had to be steady in front of the children on the drive over, and a hundred small things you have never had a spare minute to feel.

Your husband texted while you were standing there. How does it feel? And you looked at the phone and had absolutely nothing to type.

Paul names God twice before he says anything else

There is an opening in 2 Corinthians where Paul reaches for two names before he says a single thing about circumstances.

Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God.2 Corinthians 1:3-4

Father of mercies. God of all comfort. Those are titles, not descriptions of a mood, and Paul puts them at the front of a letter written by a man who has been through more than he can list.

And look at the word all. The God of all comfort, comforting in all tribulation. There is no clause in there excluding the kind of trouble that has already ended.

That matters in an empty hallway, because what you are grieving is over. The back bedroom is over. The boiler is over. And there is a quiet rule most people carry that grief about a finished hardship is somehow out of order.

You are being comforted about eight years that have already ended. I am not putting my own opinion over you. Scripture says the God of all comfort comforteth us in all our tribulation, 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter and does not check whether a hard thing is still going on before He arrives.

Nobody gets to say it was worth it

Somebody will say it this week. They will mean it warmly. 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 explain why it landed wrong.

Here is why. That judgement belongs to the woman who spent nine months in her mother's back bedroom, and to nobody else. When another person says it on your behalf they have taken the one thing those eight 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. And neither does the woman at the office, however kindly she meant congratulations.

You are the only one with standing to weigh those eight years, and you may take as long as you like. Scripture lets Job speak at length about his own suffering without cutting him off, Job 3:1-3, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a summary as the price of comfort.

The keys are not a payment

Here is what had your chest tight in that hallway.

You have started treating the house as a settlement. Eight years in one column, a set of keys in the other, books balanced, everybody may now move on.

That is not what happened, and it is a hard sum to be doing on yourself while standing in your own hall. Scripture keeps gift and endurance in separate hands, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit has never once presented anybody with an invoice.

The eight years were not installments. This house is not a reimbursement. They are not the same currency and they never were in one ledger, and running them as a transaction is exactly what stopped 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, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a family a front door as a receipt for what they endured.

Why it came up now and not before

And there is a plain reason the back bedroom arrived in that hallway and not at the time.

You could not feel it at the time. There was a five year old and a cot and a job and a drive to make, and feeling it would have cost you the steadiness that everybody in that car was depending on.

So it waited. That is what a body does. It puts things down somewhere it can find them later and it gets on with the week, and then one day the pressure comes off and everything that was put down is standing in the hall.

That is not a breakdown and it is not ingratitude. It is a woman finally having room.

You are whole now, on this side of it, and the crying was the safety coming off. 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 not at the pace of a completion date.