The Damsons on the Back Lane

The back lane runs between two fields and nobody uses it except for dogs and the occasional tractor, and about two thirds of the way along there is a stretch of damson in the hedge that has been there longer than the houses.

It is the second week of September. The fruit has that dusty blue bloom on it that comes off on your thumb and leaves the skin underneath almost black. Wasps in the windfalls, slow and drunk and not interested in anybody. A blackbird somewhere in there rummaging about.

She has an old ice cream tub with a bit of wire through it for a handle, because that is what her mother used and it has never occurred to her to buy anything better.

She has come out for forty minutes. That is the arrangement she has made with herself, out loud, in the hall, before she left.

The good fruit is always higher than it looks. She gets the low branches done in ten minutes and then stands there working out the geometry of the ones above, and eventually she goes up on the bank on one foot, with the tub in the crook of her left arm, and reaches with her right into the middle of the hedge where the best of them are.

The bank gives. Not badly. Just enough that her foot slides and her arm goes up and the tub comes out of her elbow and turns over completely in the air.

Damsons everywhere. In the grass, down the bank, one of them somehow landing on the toe of her boot and staying there.

And the blackbird goes off like a car alarm, straight out of the hedge past her head, absolutely furious, and she is left standing in the lane with her hand still up in the branches.

And you laugh. Out loud, on an empty lane, the way you have not laughed since March.

It goes on longer than the joke deserves, the way it does when it has been waiting. You have to put your hand on your knee. There is a damson on your boot and you are laughing at a bird.

And then, in the middle of it, at the top of the breath, it goes.

You do not decide to stop. Something else stops it, and it is cold, and it arrives with a whole sentence attached: and they are at home in the front room, in the middle of what they are in the middle of, and you are out here on a lane, howling.

You pick them all up. It takes twenty minutes on your knees in the wet grass and you find nearly all of them. You fill the tub to the wire.

And at the gate, before you go in, you stop and you do the thing you always do now. You arrange your face.

Nobody made that rule

I want to be careful here, and I want to say why before I say anything else.

There is a version of this message that hurries you toward being happy, and that version would be a small cruelty, so it is not the one I am writing. The person you love is genuinely in the middle of something. It is heavy and it is real and I am not going to talk about it as though it were a lesson with a bright side attached. And if nothing in you feels glad this week, nothing here is asking you to manufacture any.

What I want to look at is the rule. The one about the face at the gate.

Because somewhere in the last months a rule got made, and I would like to know who made it, and I think we both know that nobody in that front room did. They did not ask you to go without. They have not once requested that you stop laughing at birds on empty lanes. You wrote that rule yourself, in the dark, out of love, and it has been running your face ever since.

You are not taking anything from them by being glad. Scripture tells us to rejoice with them that do rejoice and weep with them that weep, and it puts both in the same breath as ordinary Christian equipment, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person able to do both in the same afternoon without either one being a lie.

And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.John 16:22

Look at what Jesus says there, and look at when He says it. He is speaking to people whose sorrow is not hypothetical and is not going to be over by tomorrow, and He does not tell them to cheer up, and He does not tell them their sorrow is a failure. He tells them about a joy with a particular property: no one takes it.

You have a gladness that nobody removes, and nobody includes you in that sentence either. That is His word on it, present and settled, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it in a person who has spent six months arranging their face, because you have been taking it from yourself out of loyalty and it has not helped a soul.

Going without has never once put more in their hands

Here is the arithmetic that the guilt is running, and I want it out in the open where you can look at it.

The guilt believes gladness is rationed. It believes that there is a fixed amount in the house, and that any of it in you is a portion that has been taken off them, so that going without yours is a way of adding to theirs.

That is not how it works, and if you say it plainly out loud you can hear that it is not. Your flatness has never once arrived in that front room as strength. Nobody in the middle of a hard thing has ever been helped by the discovery that everyone around them has gone gray.

You were never appointed the one who holds the sorrow steady for the household. James 1:17 says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, and a damson hedge in September is on that list, and the Spirit of God did not put that hedge on your route by accident on the one afternoon you had forty minutes.

And I want to guard the person you love here, because there is a version of this that turns them into somebody who would begrudge you a laugh, and they are not that. They are tired. Tired is not the same as resentful.

And you are carrying something in you that they might want to borrow. Nehemiah 8:10 says that the joy of the Lord is your strength, and notice whose joy it is in that sentence, because it is not manufactured by you and it is not owed by you, it is His, supplied, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it into a room where somebody is worn out.

Some weeks they will want to hear about the lane. Some weeks they will not, and that is allowed too, and it changes nothing about whether your gladness was a betrayal, because it never was.