I Cannot Celebrate Anything Anymore

Her fortieth was in February and you did not go.

There was a reason. There is always a reason and this one was true: it was two hours away, and there was a hotel involved, and a present, and the dress you would have needed, and by the time you had added it up in your head at the kitchen table it had become an amount you could see.

So you sent something lovely. You wrote a card, a proper one, not a quick one. You called her the following Tuesday and she said it was fine and she meant it.

And in the photographs there were nine of you from the old group and there are eight in the picture.

That is the third one this year. There was the christening, which you had a genuine clash for, and there was the leaving do for the woman at work, and now this.

And here is what has started happening, and it is the reason I am writing to you rather than about your budget.

You have begun to see an invitation as a bill.

Not consciously. But something in you does the arithmetic now before it does anything else, and the arithmetic happens so fast that you have started declining things before you have even registered that you were glad to be asked.

The thing that is quietly being spent

Let me name what is actually being spent here, because it is not money and nobody puts it on a statement.

Three times this year there was a place for you in somebody's life and the place stayed empty.

That is a real transaction. It went out of your account and it will not come back, and unlike money it does not accumulate anywhere else. Your friend turned forty once. There is a photograph of it with eight people in it.

You have spent something that does not show up on any statement, and a birthday that happened once has never once been a thing that could be paid back later. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the ledger nobody is reading to you, and it is written in Psalm 126 that he that goeth forth and weepeth bears precious seed.

You have been paying for this out of a different account than the one you are watching, and the withdrawals from that one have never once shown up in the total you keep checking. The Holy Spirit is the one who knows exactly what a sowing costs the one doing it, and it is written in Psalm 126 that they that sow in tears shall reap in joy.

And there is a second thing, which is quieter and takes longer.

Every declined invitation is a small message to the person who sent it. Not a message about money, because they do not know about the money. A message that says, in the gentlest possible way, that you would rather not.

Send enough of those, over enough years, and the invitations slow down. Not out of unkindness. Out of ordinary human reading. And then a woman finds herself with a small life and cannot work out when it got small.

You have been sending a message you never wrote, and three kind refusals have never once been read the way you meant them. Psalm 126 puts the tears and the sowing in the same motion, and the Spirit of God is the one who sees what is going into the ground when nobody else can.

They that sow in tears

Here is the line, and I want to be careful with it, because this site does not promise anything and neither will I here.

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, King James Version)

That psalm was written about a nation coming back from exile, and the picture in it is agricultural: people going out to plant in a hard season, carrying grain they would rather be eating.

I am not going to hand you that verse as a promise about a deposit. It is not one, and anybody who says so is handing you a bill with God's name on it.

What it does say, and this is the part I want you to have, is that God sees a particular kind of cost and calls it sowing rather than loss.

You are doing something God has a category for, and going without in a hard season has never once been filed by Him as waste. The Holy Spirit is the one who named it that rather than calling it a shortfall, and the written word calls the grain carried out in tears precious seed.

But now notice the verb, because it is the whole of what I want to leave with you.

He that goeth forth. The man in that verse is walking out of his house.

He is not sitting in it doing arithmetic. He is out in the field, in the weather, weeping, and doing the thing. The sowing in that picture is an act performed among other people in the open, not a set of refusals performed alone at a kitchen table.

You are permitted to go out while it is still hard, and staying home has never once been the same thing as sowing. Psalm 126 has the man going forth and weeping at the same time in the same sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who put both of those in one motion.