We Spent It On Something Real

The transfer went out on a Thursday afternoon and you watched the balance change.

Six years. Two people working. Every holiday not taken, every car kept two years too long, the quiet arithmetic in a supermarket that other people do not have to do.

And then a number that was almost all of it, moving in one motion, to pay for a burial in a country you were born in and have not lived in for eleven years.

You did not hesitate. That is the thing you keep coming back to. There was no discussion, no weighing, no moment in which the two of you sat down and considered whether there was another way. Your wife said what needs to happen, and you said what it costs, and she said send it, and that was the whole conversation.

You would do it again tomorrow. You know that with complete certainty.

And also, on some evenings, when the account is open on the table and the figure at the top of it is what it is, something in you goes very still and you cannot name what the feeling is, and you have not said one word about it to her.

Two true things at once

Let me name the thing that has gone still in you, because I think it has no name yet and that is why it will not settle.

It is not regret. Looking for regret turns up nothing at all, and the absence of it has been confusing, because the assumption was that a feeling on those evenings must be some version of wishing you had not.

It is grief with nowhere to sit.

You buried your mother and you paid for it and those two happened in the same week, and the paying has swallowed the burying. Every time you open that account you are looking at her funeral, in figures, and there is no way to grieve a figure.

You have been trying to mourn a person through a balance, and a number on a screen has never once been able to hold what a mother was. The Holy Spirit is the one sitting at a kitchen table with a man who cannot name what he feels, and it is written in Psalm 90 that we ask God to establish the work of our hands.

And there is a second thing underneath it, which is harder to say out loud and which I suspect is closer to the middle.

Somewhere in the last months you started to wonder whether six years of saving had been wasted.

Not because the money went on something unworthy. Because the six years now leave nothing standing. The deposit they were for did not happen, the evidence of them is gone, and a man measuring his life by what is left at the end of it finds an empty room.

You have six years of work that produced something, and the fact that it cannot be seen has never once meant it was not there. Psalm 90 asks God to establish the work of our hands, which is a prayer offered by people whose work does not look established, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that prayer honest.

Establish thou the work of our hands

Here is the verse, and I want you to notice what kind of people pray it.

And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it. (Psalm 90:17, King James Version)

He asks twice. That repetition is not decoration. A man does not ask for the same thing twice in one line unless he badly wants it and is not currently looking at it.

And read the psalm above it. It is the one about our days being threescore years and ten, and about them being cut off and flying away, and about a thousand years being like yesterday when it is past. That whole psalm is about work that does not last.

So the prayer at the end of it is not the prayer of a man watching his work stand. It is the prayer of a man watching things not stand, asking God to do the standing.

You are praying the prayer of a man whose work went out in one transfer, and a psalm about things that do not last has never once been a psalm for careless people. The Holy Spirit is the one who thought that was the right place for it, and the written word puts that request at the end of a poem about everything passing.

And here is what I want to put weight on, because it is the correction and it is not a promise.

What you did with that money is work of your hands. Not the saving of it. The spending of it. A man in another country got his mother buried the way she should have been buried, because two people here went without for six years without knowing why.

That is not a wasted six years. That is six years that turned out to have been for something nobody could see coming, and the fact that it was not the thing you were aiming at does not put it in the wasted column.

You have done a thing with your hands that is finished and cannot be undone, and an emptied account has never once been the record of what you did with it. Psalm 90 asks God to establish the work of our hands rather than the results of them, and the Spirit of God is the one who knows the difference.