He Has Given Up And I Have Not

He stopped checking it in about March.

You did not notice at the time. It was not announced. He used to ask, every few weeks, in the way people do when they are passing through a room, and at some point in the spring the asking stopped and it took you until the summer to work out that it had.

So you asked him about it in July, in the car, and he said something short and pleasant and then put the radio on.

And you have known since that afternoon.

He has not said it and he will not say it and there may not even be a sentence in him to say. But somewhere between January and March your husband stopped believing that this is going to happen, and he has gone on paying into it anyway, every month, without complaint, because that is who he is.

And you have not stopped believing. That is the part that is hardest to sit with.

So there are two people in this house going in the same direction, doing the same thing, paying the same amount, and only one of them thinks it leads anywhere, and neither of you has said so out loud, and every conversation about it now has a false bottom.

What his quiet is actually made of

Let me offer a reading of your husband that is different from the one that has been carried in this house since July, because I think the current one is costing you both.

The reading in the house is that he gave up.

Here is another. He got tired of being disappointed in front of you.

You have a second reading available that nobody has offered you, and the first explanation that arrives has never once been the only one that fits. Isaiah 40 speaks to them that have no might rather than to the ones who walked away, and the Spirit of God is the one who knows which of the two is standing in your kitchen.

A man who asks every few weeks is a man who is hoping out loud, in a room, where somebody can see it. And each time the answer came back and the answer was the same, something in him took a small hit, in your presence, and after enough of those he stopped putting himself in the position.

That is not giving up on the house. That is a man protecting you from watching his face do that again.

You have been reading his silence as indifference, and a man who stops asking has never once automatically been a man who stopped wanting. The Holy Spirit is the one who knows the difference between a man who has quit and a man who is out of strength, and it is written in Isaiah 40 that they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.

And notice that he has never once missed a payment.

That is the fact that does not fit your reading and I want you to sit on it for a moment. A man who has given up stops paying. Your husband has gone on putting money into a thing he has privately stopped believing in, every month, for half a year, with no expectation of anything.

You are married to a man who kept paying into a hope he could not feel, and doing that has never once been the behavior of somebody who stopped caring. Isaiah 40 speaks to people whose strength has run out rather than to people who abandoned the road, and the Spirit of God is the one who addressed them in that condition.

They shall renew their strength

Here is the passage, and I want you to notice who it is spoken to.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. (Isaiah 40:29, King James Version)

To them that have no might.

That is the audience. Not the strong. Not the ones still asking every few weeks. The faint, and the ones with no might left, and, in the next verse, young men who utterly fall, which is not a gentle phrase.

Isaiah is writing to a people who had been waiting a very long time and had run out.

You have a husband who is exactly the person that passage was written for, and a man with no might left has never once been outside what God was talking about. The Holy Spirit is the one who aimed it there rather than at the strong, and the written word names the faint and the fallen as the ones being addressed.

And then the word renew, which is worth a moment.

It does not say they shall find strength. It says renew, which assumes there was some and it ran out and it is being replaced. The verse takes it as given that a person runs dry, and it builds the running dry into the promise rather than treating it as a fault.

Which means the condition your husband is in is written into the sentence, not excluded from it.

You are living with a man scripture describes rather than one it warns about, and running out has never once been the same as walking away. Isaiah 40 builds the running dry into the promise itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the renewing rather than asking him to find it.