The Handwriting Was Hers and the Faithfulness Was His

The window seat has a cushion that has gone flat in the middle in the shape of one particular person, and everybody in the house knows whose shape it is.

Late afternoon, that low light in November that comes in almost horizontal and makes everything the color of weak tea. Blanket. Two of them, and her friend is on the floor with her back against the radiator because that is the warm spot.

They were looking for something else and found the old one. The Bible she had at twenty two, with the cover coming away and about six hundred things folded inside it.

And in the margin of Isaiah, in handwriting she recognizes as hers and cannot connect to herself, there is a note. Four words and a date.

She read it twice and then put her hand flat on the page.

Because the woman who wrote that was in the middle of something with God. It is obvious from four words. And she has spent the years since going through everything at a certain distance, and she has come, in the last few minutes, to a grief that has surprised her, which is that she is mourning that woman the way you mourn somebody who died.

Sit in the window seat, love. Because there is one sentence in Second Timothy that I want you to hear, and it is not the one that gets quoted.

If we believe not, yet He abideth faithful

Paul is quoting what looks like an early hymn, four lines of it, and the last one goes like this.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

Now look at how that sentence is built, because the grammar carries the whole thing.

If we believe not. It states the worst case. Not doubt, not a wobble. The absence of it.

Yet he abideth faithful. And the response is not conditional. There is no clause about what has to happen first.

He cannot deny himself. And then the reason, and the reason is not about us at all. It is about what He is. His faithfulness is not a response to our condition, it is an expression of His own nature, and He is not able to act against it.

Which means the continuity of the last few years did not run through you. It ran through Him.

You are held by a faithfulness that is not a response to your condition, and the verse gives the reason as His nature rather than yours. That is not a comfortable reading of a hard line; 2 Timothy 2:13 states the worst case first and answers it with an unconditional, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes four lines of an early hymn and lays them in a window seat in November light. The thread you thought you dropped was never in your hand.

Now the grief, and it deserves better than being argued out of you.

You are mourning her. And that grief is not silly and I am not going to talk you out of it, because something real is being noticed: there was a warmth and an immediacy in that woman that you have not had for a while, and noticing its absence is honest.

But look at what you are treating as dead. You are treating her as a separate person who existed and ended.

She did not end. She went quiet. And the difference between those two is the difference between a funeral and a long winter.

You are mourning somebody who went quiet rather than somebody who ended, and those are two entirely different situations. Song of Solomon 5:2 says I sleep, but my heart waketh, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that distinction real in a woman rather than a nice idea, because sleeping and dying are not the same and the book knows it.

What she wrote, and who kept it

One more thing, and it is small and it is the one I would want you to keep.

She wrote four words in a margin. And they are still there. The Bible sat in a box or on a shelf through the whole of the last stretch, and the ink did not fade, and the note did not require anybody to be feeling anything for it to remain true.

That is a small picture of the bigger thing. What she believed at twenty two is not less true now because you cannot currently feel it. Truth does not have a temperature.

You are still standing on things that are true regardless of what you can feel about them, and none of them expired during the quiet. Isaiah 40:8 says the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand for ever, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a permanence like that a comfort in a woman looking at her own handwriting.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than read old margins out loud.

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 the warmth you had at twenty two. 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.