The Shower on Saturday

The card has been on the table since Monday and you have moved it three times to wipe under it.

It is a good card. You chose it carefully, in the shop, standing there for longer than a person needs to stand in front of cards, and you brought it home and put it down and have not written in it.

Saturday at two. Her mother's house. You know the room it will be in, and you know where you would sit, and you know exactly what the first forty minutes are like because you have done four of these in three years.

You love her. That is not in question at any point in this. You have loved her since you were both nineteen and she is the person you would ring at two in the morning.

And every time you pick up the pen your hand does not move.

There is a version of you that goes on Saturday, is warm, is genuinely delighted, holds the baby when it is passed round, laughs at the right moments, and drives home and sits in the car outside your house for a while. You have been that version four times.

There is another version that does not go, and that one has been standing in your kitchen since Monday, and what she is most afraid of is not the room.

She is afraid that not going means she has become a person who cannot be glad for her friend.

The verse says near, and it says brokenhearted

There is a line in Psalm 34 that does not ask anybody to tidy up first.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

He does not draw near to the ones who have processed it. He draws near to the broken hearted, which is a description of a state and not of an achievement, and it is offered in the present tense with no conditions attached anywhere in the sentence.

That is important on a Monday with an unsigned card, because you have been quietly assuming that God is waiting for you to sort out your attitude before He comes close.

He is not. Scripture attaches no conditions to that verse at all, Psalm 34:18, and the Holy Spirit came near on Monday while you were moving the card to wipe under it.

You are already near to God in exactly the state you are in. I am not putting my own reassurance over you here. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes near mean near rather than a nice general truth.

There is no cause and there is no fault

Let me be as clear as I can be, because you may have been handed things.

There is nothing you did. There is no decision to trace, no faith that was weighed and found wanting, no reason anybody is entitled to guess at. Anybody who has implied otherwise, however gently and however much they love you, was speaking outside Scripture and outside their authority.

I am not going to promise you a child. That promise is not mine to make and making it would be a cruelty in a warm voice.

And her news is her news. It is not an answer to a question about you, and it is not evidence about your account with God. Two things happened in two lives and Scripture never once linked them.

You are not under a judgement and this is not a comparison. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the Holy Spirit does not run one woman's life against another's.

What the unsigned card is actually asking

Here is what has had you stuck since Monday, and it is not the party.

You have turned Saturday into a test. Going means you are still a good friend and a generous woman and someone who has kept her heart soft. Not going means you have become the other thing, the one people go quiet about, the one who could not manage it in the end.

That is an enormous amount of weight to hang on an afternoon at somebody's mother's house. Scripture never set that exam, Romans 8:1, and the Holy Spirit has not been invigilating it.

And it is not a real test, because there is no version of you that has stopped loving her. You bought the card. You stood in the shop for a long time choosing it. Nobody who has become hard stands in a shop like that.

You are not a woman whose heart has gone hard. Scripture says charity beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, 1 Corinthians 13:7, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping that alive in you through four of these in three years, which is not nothing and has cost you more than anybody in that room will know.

So here is the permission

You may go, and you may not go, and neither one is the verdict you have made it into.

If you go: go, be glad, and leave when you need to leave. You do not owe anybody the full three hours, and slipping out after the cake is not a failure, it is a woman managing her own strength. Scripture says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, Psalm 103:14, and the Holy Spirit is not counting the minutes you stayed.

If you do not go: sign the card, write something true and warm in it, and get it to her before Saturday with something small. And then tell her, in your own words, that you are not up to the room this time and that you love her. She has known you since you were nineteen. She will not need it explained.

The one thing I would not do is nothing. Not because nothing is a sin, but because nothing is what leaves you sitting in a kitchen on Saturday afternoon at two o'clock with the card still on the table, and that is the version of this day that costs you the most.

You have permission, and it comes from God and not from me. Scripture says a bruised reed shall he not break, Isaiah 42:3, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over a woman with an unsigned card holding a clipboard.