The Ninth Year of Not Knowing

Ollie Tackett changed the bulb over her back door on the first cold night of every October, and she had done it eight times now.

It was a yellow bug light, because the white ones brought moths, and it burned from dusk until she got up, every night, all night, nine years running. Her electric bill was four dollars a month higher than her neighbors' and she had done that arithmetic once and never done it again.

Wyatt had a key to that door when he was seventeen. It hung on a piece of baling twine because he lost everything he owned that was not tied to something else, and he used to come in at all hours and eat whatever was in the icebox and leave the plate in the sink, and she used to fuss at him about the plate. She would give a good deal now for a plate in that sink.

He left at nineteen. She is careful about the word left, because he did not slam a door and drive off. He got thin, and then he got quiet, and then he was staying with people whose names she did not know, and then there was a stretch of months where he called from numbers she could not call back, and then the calls stopped. That was nine years ago in March. She does not know what town he is in. She does not know if he is warm tonight. That is the sentence she says to God every evening and she has never once found a better way to say it.

People have opinions about the door. Her daughter thinks she ought to lock it and has said so with tears in her eyes, and she is not wrong to say it. Her pastor asked her once, kindly, whether the light was helping her or hurting her, which was a fair question and she has never answered it. The man at the hardware store sells her the bulbs and does not ask anything at all, which is why she goes there.

What she keeps thinking about, though, is a morning long before any of this. Wyatt was four days old and she was holding him in the front room with the window open, and she read out loud over him the verse her own grandmother had read over her, out of the prophet, about God pouring His Spirit on your offspring and His blessing on the ones that come after you. She did not make it up. She did not dream it. She read it off the page and said his name into it and meant every word.

Nine years of not knowing has not moved that morning one inch. It sits there in her memory, an ordinary Tuesday with a window open, exactly where it has always been.

Last November Cass Bledsoe from down the road came up the steps in the dark with a jar of chow-chow and saw the light on, and she stood there a second and asked what she had been wanting to ask for years. Ollie. Honey. How long are you fixing to do this?

And Ollie heard herself answer, and it surprised her, because she had never once put it that way in her own head.

I am not keeping it on so he will come, she said. I am keeping it on because I was told something, and I have not been told anything different.

What nine years is evidence of

I am not going to explain your nine years to you. I do not know what they are for, and I am not going to invent a reason and hand it to you with a straight face, because that has been done to you already and you can hear it coming now from the end of the driveway.

What I want to do is much smaller and much sturdier. I want to ask what those nine years are actually evidence of.

Because your body has already decided. Nine years of an unanswered question builds a verdict in a person whether they consent to it or not, and the verdict says: nothing is happening, therefore nothing was ever said. The silence gets promoted from a circumstance to a ruling. And once it is a ruling, the morning with the window open becomes a sweet thing a young woman did before she knew better.

So let us go and look at what Scripture does with people who held something a long time and did not get it.

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.Hebrews 11:13

Read what that verse does not do. It does not correct them. It does not explain why they did not receive. It does not suggest that the promise was misheard, that they had held it wrong, or that a more sensible person would have let go around year six. It calls what they were doing faith, and it puts them in the chapter of honor for doing it.

You are standing in the exact company Hebrews 11 was written to honor, right now, in your ninth year, with the light on and nothing to show anybody. That is not my encouragement to you; it is what the written word does with people in your position, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a list of names from four thousand years ago and sets a woman on a back porch in among them.

Seen afar off, and greeted

There are four verbs in that sentence and I want you to have all four, because they describe what you keep doing on that porch and nobody has ever told you it had a name.

They saw it. Afar off, which means it was not close and they knew it was not close. They were persuaded of it, which is a settled thing and not a mood. They embraced it, and the old word there is the word for greeting somebody across a distance, the way you would raise your hand to a figure coming up a road who is still too far off to hear you. And they confessed they were strangers, which is what a person says when they have stopped expecting the country they are in to hand them the thing.

That is not resignation. Look at it again. Greeting something from far off is an act of the most stubborn kind of belief there is, because you cannot greet what you do not believe is coming up the road.

You have been greeting a promise across a distance for nine winters, and the word of God calls that faith and not foolishness. Hebrews 11:13 is where it is written, and it is His Spirit who has been holding your hand up all this time, on the nights you did it out of habit as much as the nights you did it out of hope.

The door is not the verdict

Now the hard part, and I am going to say it plainly because plainness is the only kindness available here.

The door may stay shut. I am not able to tell you it opens, and I would not tell you if I could, because a woman who has waited nine years does not need one more person spending her hope on a guess. What I can tell you, and what I will stand on with both feet, is that a shut door is not a ruling and never has been.

For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.Psalm 119:89

Settled means filed, fixed, standing. Not pending. Not under review while the circumstances are examined. The verse says where it is settled, too: in heaven, which is precisely the one address that nine years of a silent phone cannot reach.

Right now, as you read, what was read over a four-day-old baby in a room with the window open is standing exactly where it was put. Scripture says His word is settled for ever, in Psalm 119:89, and the Holy Spirit did not sign that promise as a nine-year note that comes due and expires. Your not knowing is real. It is not a repeal.

Hold both of those at once. That is what this whole thing asks of you and it is the only thing it asks. Not to feel better about the silence. Not to stop grieving it. To keep the promise in the same hand as the trouble, and refuse to let the trouble be the one that talks.