The Anniversary Nobody Marks

It comes round in March and she does nothing about it.

That is important to say. She does not mark it. There is no ritual, she does not take the day off, she has never lit anything or gone anywhere. If you followed her round on that date you would see an entirely ordinary day.

She simply knows.

She wakes up and knows before she is properly awake, the way you know it is Saturday. And then she gets up and does the day and it passes and nobody in her life has any idea that anything about it was different.

It is the anniversary of when the waiting started.

Not a bereavement. Nothing anybody sent a card about. A date when a particular thing became clear, which nobody else in the world would identify as the beginning of anything, and which she has counted from ever since.

Here is what she has never said to a living soul.

She counts it in years now, and this year the number went up to one she does not like.

There is no reason a number should matter more than the year before it. Nothing changed between one and the next. But some numbers land differently when you say them to yourself in a kitchen at half six in the morning, and this one did, and she stood there with the kettle going and had to put both hands on the counter for a second.

Then she made the tea and got on with it, because that is what she does.

If you have a date in your year that nobody else knows about, come and stand at this stile a minute. Nobody is going to ask you what it is.

Somebody has been counting, and the image is almost embarrassing

There is a verse about God and a person's grief that is so physical it makes some people uncomfortable, and the discomfort is the point.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Three images stacked in one line and every one of them is about record keeping.

Tellest means counted. Not observed, not noticed. Counted, the way a person counts a thing they are keeping track of on purpose.

Then a bottle, which is the strangest of the three, because it is a container for keeping something you do not want to lose.

And then a book, and the man asks it as a question because he already knows the answer.

You have been counted rather than merely seen, and the counting is deliberate. Psalm 56:8 uses three separate images of record keeping in a single verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that verse in the book rather than a more dignified one, which means the private arithmetic you do every March is not the only place your years are being kept.

The number is allowed to be as big as it is

Now let me deal with what happened at that counter, because it deserves better than being tidied away.

A number went up and it landed differently and you had to hold on to something. That is not weakness and it is not self pity. It is what happens when a quantity that has been abstract for years suddenly becomes concrete in a kitchen at half six.

And nothing about that means you are handling it badly. You have handled it, silently, without marking it, without asking anybody for anything, for the whole of it.

I am not going to tell you to look at it differently. You are not being asked to make the number smaller by feeling better about it. Proverbs 13:12 says hope deferred makes the heart sick and stops there, with no correction and no advice attached to that clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it in that order, which means a long number producing a sick heart is exactly what the word says will happen.

And nobody is going to hand you the second half of the proverb this morning. It exists, and it is true, and rushing you into it would be doing to you what has been done to you every time somebody meant well.

You are held in the first half for as long as the first half is where you are. Isaiah 42:3 says a bruised reed He does not break and smoking flax He does not quench, and it is His Spirit who carries a word at the temperature a person can take, which means nobody here is hurrying you anywhere.

God is the one holding you, and He was holding you at that counter with both hands on it, and He has been holding you through every March since the first one.