Beautiful In Its Time, Including the Quiet Part

The shoebox has a rubber band round it that snapped about four years ago and was replaced with string, and the string is the sort you get on a parcel and it has been on there ever since.

Afternoon. The good light, the kind that comes in the side window between two and four in October. Two of them at the table, tea, a plate of something.

Her sister in law is reading out a card from 1997 and doing the voice, and they are both crying with laughing at it.

And then she picks up the next one and it is a birthday card, unsigned, unsent, still in its envelope, and she knows immediately who it was for and roughly when.

She never sent it. She bought it, put it in the drawer, meant to write it that evening, and then a week went past, and then it was too late to send, and then it was too late to explain, and then it was just a card in a drawer.

And what happens next is not really about the card.

What happens is that she starts to see the whole shape of a stretch of years in which quite a lot of things went like that. Not badly. Not wickedly. Just past her, while she was going through everything and being present at nothing.

And by the time her sister in law has finished laughing she has begun, quietly, to build a case.

Sit still a minute, honey, and let me read you something out of Ecclesiastes, which is the honest book.

Everything, and that includes the quiet part

Ecclesiastes has just given the list. A time to be born and a time to die, to plant and to pluck up, to keep silence and to speak. Fourteen pairs of them. And then this.

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.Ecclesiastes 3:11

Two halves and I want both of them.

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time. Every thing. And the list right before it includes the losing, the plucking up, the keeping silence and the mourning. Those are in the every thing.

No man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end. And then, immediately, a statement that nobody gets to see the whole shape of what God is doing.

So the verse says two things in one breath: it is all being made beautiful, and you cannot see how.

You are inside a work that is being made beautiful and that you were never given the sightline to assess, and both halves are in the same sentence. That is not a way of avoiding what you have seen this afternoon; Ecclesiastes 3:11 puts the beauty and the unknowability together, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the most honest book in the Bible and lays it on a kitchen table with a shoebox on it. You are not able to grade a stretch of years. Nobody is.

Now the case you are building, and it deserves a straight answer.

You have taken one unsent card and extrapolated it into a verdict about a decade. That is what a case is: a small piece of evidence and a large conclusion.

But you are missing every single piece of evidence that would go the other way, because nobody keeps those. Nobody saves the phone calls they did make. There is no box in this house containing the two hundred ordinary kindnesses you performed in the same stretch, because kindnesses do not come with envelopes.

You are prosecuting a decade using only the evidence that got kept in a box, and the evidence that would clear you was never the sort of thing anybody files. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps the ledger that nobody else keeps, which is the only complete one.

Time is a thing He gives, not a thing you spend

One more, and then we will get to the part that matters.

Look at the phrase again: in his time. There is a possessive in there. The time in which everything is made beautiful belongs to Him.

Which means that stretch of years was not, in the accounting that matters, your budget to spend or waste. It was a season, and seasons in that chapter are given rather than earned, and the chapter is at pains to say that they come and go without anybody's permission.

That does not make the card unsent. It does put it in a different category from a debt.

You have been treating years as a budget you overspent, and the chapter that lists the seasons hands every one of them out rather than billing for them. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a description of God's generosity rather than a poem about the passage of time.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than do the voice for a card from 1997.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how many of the last ten years you can account for. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.