The Letter I Sent in April

You wrote it four times before you wrote it once.

The first version had the list in it. Every one of them, in order, with the years attached, because you thought at the time that forgiving had to name what was being forgiven or it did not count.

The second version was shorter and colder. The third one you tore up in the kitchen without reading it back.

The fourth one was three paragraphs. You said you loved him. You said you were not carrying it any more, and you were specific enough that he would know exactly what it was, and you did not ask him for anything. You signed it with your first name only, the way you did when you were both young.

You walked to the postbox at the end of the lane on a Tuesday in April, and you stood there for a minute with it in your hand, and then you posted it and walked home and cried at the sink.

That was four years ago.

He has not answered. Not a card, not a message, not a word through anybody. Your cousin says he is well. Your cousin says it in the voice of somebody who has been asked not to say more than that.

And what has crept in over four springs is not the anger. The anger went with the letter. What has crept in is the wondering whether you made the whole thing up, the prompting and the certainty and the sense in the kitchen that God wanted it sent.

The psalm knows about carrying something out and not seeing it

There is a psalm that describes a person going out with something in their hands and crying while they do it.

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.Psalm 126:5-6

Read what the man in it is actually doing. He is walking out with something precious in his arms and putting it into ground he cannot see into, and he is crying while he does it. The going out is the hard part. The psalm does not pretend otherwise.

And notice what it is not about. It is not about money and it is not a transaction. What is carried out in that verse is precious to the one carrying it, and what is put into the ground is put there without a receipt.

That is a letter posted at the end of a lane in April. You are the one in the verse, not the one watching it. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says he that goes forth weeping, bearing precious seed, Psalm 126:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets an old psalm settle over a woman at a sink four years later.

Obedience is not measured by the reply

Here is the thing four silent years does, and it does it slowly enough that nobody notices.

It rewrites the meaning of the letter. It takes a thing that was obedience when you posted it and quietly reclassifies it as a mistake, on the grounds that nothing came back.

But nothing in Scripture measures an obedience by its reception. Not one thing. Prophets were sent to people who did not listen and the sending was not thereby canceled. Jesus told a story about a father who ran down a road, and He did not tell us what happened to the older brother, who stayed outside and is still outside at the end of the parable.

You have already done the thing you were asked to do. Scripture says as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, Romans 12:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who wrote as much as lieth in you into that sentence, because He knew the other half was never yours.

The letter was finished the day it left your hand. What happens next was never the same job.

What forgiveness did and did not buy

Let me be plain about something, because a lot of people are not.

Forgiving him did not obligate him. It did not create a debt in the other direction. It was not a move in a negotiation, and it was not a key that should have opened a door by now.

If it were any of those, it would not have been forgiveness. It would have been a strategy with a longer wait than usual.

Forgiveness is a thing you do in front of God about what is in your own hands. It is complete when it is done, and it stays complete in a silence.

You are free of it whether or not he ever says a word. Scripture says forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you, Ephesians 4:32, and the Holy Spirit sealed that in a kitchen four years ago and has not been waiting on the post since.

The wondering, and where it came from

Now the harder part, and it is the one that has actually cost you sleep.

You have started to doubt that God asked. Not to doubt God. To doubt that a specific, ordinary, plain-clothes prompting in a kitchen was Him at all, because the evidence you expected did not come.

I want to name where that reasoning goes wrong, gently. It assumes God's voice is verified by outcomes. On that rule, half of Scripture is unverified. Jeremiah is a real prophet with a real word and a country that did not listen for forty years, Jeremiah 25:3, and the Holy Spirit did not stop having spoken because nobody replied.

You are not a woman who imagined it. Scripture says the word of God does not return void, Isaiah 55:11, and the Holy Spirit does not stop being the one who spoke because a brother chose not to answer.

You are allowed to hold that without knowing what happened to the letter.