What Still Takes the Time It Takes

He puts the broad beans in during November, which surprises people who have never grown anything.

The plot is on the edge of the estate, forty paces by fifteen, with a shed that leans and a water butt that has been green since the nineties. Thirty years he has had it. He knows which corner holds the frost and which end goes first in a dry August, and none of that came from being told.

His granddaughter comes up on Saturdays now. She is seven. She likes the water butt, the wheelbarrow, and being allowed to carry things that are slightly too heavy for her, and she asks about four hundred questions a morning, which he considers a fair rate.

That Saturday she was pressing beans into the trench with her thumb, one every eight inches, doing it properly because he had shown her once and she had taken it seriously.

"When can we eat them?"

"June."

And she waited. She stood there with her hand still in the soil and waited for the rest of the sentence, the part where he explained how to make it be sooner, or where he said it was a joke, or where somebody arrived with an alternative. And there wasn't any rest of the sentence. There was just June, and eight inches, and a seven year old holding a bean and looking at him as though he had said something in another language.

He thought about that all week and got it wrong all week. He kept telling himself he was sad for her, that she was growing up in a world that would never make her wait for anything, and that something would be missing in her because of it.

It was only on the Thursday, standing at the sink, that he understood he had been lying to himself in a kindly direction.

He is not grieving for her. He is grieving for himself.

Because he has stopped waiting too. Nothing in his own week has a season in it any more. Everything he wants shows up before he has finished wanting it, every question he asks is answered inside a minute, and he cannot remember the last time he genuinely anticipated anything, and he has been trying for months to say what it is that he has lost.

And that is you, at the sink, on a Thursday. You have a grief with no name on it, and no one to take it to, because the moment you start to say it out loud you can hear how it sounds, like a man complaining that things are too convenient, and you would rather carry it than be answered like that.

The thing you lost has a name

Let me say the true thing before the hopeful one, because hope laid on top of an unnamed grief never reaches the man underneath it.

This is a bereavement, and you should be allowed to call it that. Not a mood, not ingratitude, not an old man's grumble. Something shared was lost, and it was one of the quiet foundations of an ordinary life. Waiting used to be something everyone did together. It set the pace of a street. It made a Friday different from a Tuesday. It gave people a common experience of not yet, and not yet turns out to have been doing an enormous amount of work in the human heart that nobody itemized at the time.

So do not let anybody tell you the ache is small. It is not small, and the fact that it is difficult to phrase is not evidence that it is imaginary. Some of the largest losses a person carries are the ones with no funeral.

You are not being foolish, and the grief is not a fault in your character. Scripture is full of people who mourned changes nobody could reverse, and it never once tells them to be more reasonable about it, and the Holy Spirit is named the Comforter precisely because comfort is what is required when a thing genuinely cannot be undone.

But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.Psalm 102:27

Look at what that verse is set against, because the setting is the whole point. The psalm has just said that the heavens are the work of His hands, and that they will wear out like a coat, and that He folds them up and changes them the way a man changes a shirt. Everything in the picture is moving. And then, in the middle of all that motion, one clause with no movement in it at all: thou art the same.

That is not a comfort about the world staying still. It is the opposite. It is a comfort for people watching the world not stay still, which is exactly the room you are standing in.

You have something under your feet that does not move with the weather. His word says of God that He changes not, and the same verse says therefore ye are not consumed, which puts the reason a person survives an unravelling squarely on God's constancy and nowhere near their own, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that a floor rather than a phrase.

The footing is a Person, not a forecast

Here is the move that has been happening without your noticing, and it is the most natural one in the world.

When the ground moves, a person goes looking for a map. You want somebody to tell you where all this is going, so that you can put your weight down. The half hunting has gone on for months now: an explanation, a shape, an account of the ending that would let a man rest.

And the honest word is this: a forecast could not hold you even if you had one. It is not that the answer is being withheld. It is that a prediction is made of the wrong material. Nobody has ever been steadied by knowing the shape of the future, and the proof is that the people in Scripture who were told the most about what was coming were the ones who wept hardest. Information is not footing. It never was, and the appetite for it is the appetite of a man reaching for a handrail that is painted on the wall.

You were made to stand on somebody, not on something. Scripture says my times are in thy hand, and it does not say my times are explained to me, and the Holy Spirit was given as an indwelling Comforter rather than a briefing, which tells you what sort of steadiness was on offer all along.

And notice what waiting turns into once He is the one you are waiting on. The prophet says they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, and the word underneath wait there is not the word for killing time in a queue. It is a word for twisting strands together, the way a rope is made. Waiting on Him is not a delay you endure. It is a braiding, and the strength comes from the twisting.

You have not been left to work this out on your own. Scripture says God is a very present help in trouble, and present is a word about location rather than a word about timetable, and the Holy Spirit was sent to be alongside a person in exactly the hours when nothing in the world will hold still.