The Letter That Stopped At The First Line

The kettle had boiled twice and he had not made the tea either time.

It was twenty to six. The kitchen was the only lit room in the house, and the bulb over the table laid a yellow circle on a pad of blue lined paper. Daniel had bought the pad for this. A letter deserved paper. The woman it was going to had moved four hours north a long time ago, and they had kept up the way people do, birthdays, a call at the turn of the year, one funeral in the rain. In March she had written to ask, kindly and with no edge in it at all, what he was doing these days on a Sunday.

He had been trying to answer since March.

The first attempt began: Dear friend, I am now a

He stopped at the word after am. He held the pen above the paper until his wrist ached, then tore the sheet off and started again.

The second began: Dear friend, I suppose you could call me

He stopped there too. He knew exactly what the sentence wanted. It wanted one word, the kind of short word a person can say in a doorway while the other one is still holding their coat. Every word he reached for had something stuck to it. One had an argument stuck to it. One had a building stuck to it, and a corridor inside that building, and a conversation in that corridor he had never quite recovered from. One had a man's face stuck to it. The words were all still in the language. None of them were still available to him.

He could have written four pages on what he actually believed. He had written them in his head at traffic lights. He believed God made the world and has not walked away from it. He believed Jesus was raised, in a body, on a particular morning, and that the morning changed the shape of every morning since. He believed the Holy Spirit was in the room when he prayed at the sink with the water running so nobody upstairs would hear.

He could say all of that at length. He could not say the noun.

By the eighth sheet the tea had gone cold and the sky over the neighbor's fence had turned from black to the color of weak coffee. By the tenth he had stopped tearing the sheets off neatly and was simply pulling.

The eleventh sheet said: Dear friend, I am.

Two words and a full stop he had not meant to put there. He looked at it for a long while. Then he did the strangest thing he had done all week, which was nothing at all. He did not tear it off. He set the pen down beside the pad, and he put his hand flat on the paper, and the light came up in the window, and the letter sat there finished at the first line and not finished in the slightest.

Perhaps your letter is in a drawer. Perhaps it is a message you have begun nine times and deleted nine times, because the first line wants a word and the word is gone.

What Moses asked for, and what he was handed

There is a man standing in front of a bush that is burning and is not being consumed, and he is not asking a philosophical question. He is asking a logistics question. He has been told to go back to a people in slavery and speak on someone else's behalf, and he knows the first thing they will ask, because it is the first thing anyone asks. They will want the name. Give me the noun, he says. Give me the one word I can carry back in my pocket and set down in front of them.

He is not given a noun. He is given a verb, in the first person, and then the same verb again with a small word between them holding the two ends together. The answer is the plainest possible statement of being, said twice, so that the doubling itself becomes the weight. A noun could have been carried in a pocket. What he was actually handed could only be carried by staying near the One who said it.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.Exodus 3:14

Now look again at where your letter stopped. It stopped at the exact two words God chose for Himself. You are inside this faith right now, at a kitchen table, with an unfinished first line in front of you, and the ground under that is not my opinion: Exodus 3:14 is the written record of the God you are still praying to declining a category for Himself, and the same Spirit who set that sentence down is the Spirit who has kept you praying with the water running.

A label is a good and useful thing and nothing here runs it down. It is shorthand, and shorthand exists because people meet each other in doorways and hallways and hospital corridors and have to place one another quickly. The words you have lost were built by people who loved something real and wanted to hand it on to their grandchildren. That love was not a mistake. But shorthand is a convenience, and a convenience can be taken from you without the thing it was pointing at going anywhere.

You have not been demoted. Nothing about your standing moved when your vocabulary did, because your standing was never filed under a word you supplied. His word says in 2 Timothy 2:19 that the Lord knows them that are His, and notice the direction of the knowing: it runs from His side to yours, and His Spirit is what makes that line land on you this morning instead of sliding past.

There is a difference between a name and a description, and Moses walked away from that bush holding a description he could not shorten. Everyone since has done the same. The people who have carried this faith longest have all, at some point, had to say something long and clumsy because the short thing had been spoiled for them. That is not decline. That is what happens when the reality outlasts the container.

You were His before you ever learned the vocabulary, and you were His through the years the vocabulary worked, and you are His now with the pad in front of you and nothing to write on it. That is what is promised in the covenant Scripture keeps returning to, that He takes His people to Himself, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on the far side of a completed sentence before He comes into the room.

I am not going to hand you a replacement word, and I want you to know that I am refusing on purpose. A word handed over by a stranger is a coat that does not fit, and you would be back at this table in a year with a new noun spoiled and the same ache underneath it. And nobody here is asking you what happened. You have told that story to enough people who only wanted the summary.