The Word That Is Not in the Letter

You know where the comma is. That is how many times you have read it.

Second paragraph, third line, after the word changes and before the word which. You know the letter is signed by somebody whose name has three initials. You know it was dictated on a Tuesday and typed on a Thursday, because both dates are on it, and you have wondered about that gap more than once.

You have read it in the kitchen and in the car. You read it once in a supermarket car park because you had it in your coat.

And every time, you are looking for the same thing.

Not information. You have all the information; you could recite the letter, and you have looked up every term in it, and you now know more about the terminology than is useful to anybody. What you are hunting for is a tone. A word tucked in somewhere that leans one way rather than the other. A phrase whose weight might tip if you read it once more, at a different hour, in a different light.

You are looking for reassurance in a document that does not contain any.

That is not stupidity. It is what a person does when the only object in the room that touches the thing they are afraid of is a piece of paper. So you keep going back to it, because it is the only place to go, and each reading costs a little and gives nothing back.

The forty-first reading will not change the second paragraph.

What this page will not do

I am not going to interpret your letter. I have not seen it, I am not qualified, and a stranger who offers you a reading of your own results is doing you harm dressed as kindness.

I am not going to tell you what it means or what is coming. Nobody on the internet knows and the people who imply otherwise are selling something.

And I am not going to tell you to stop asking. Take every question you have to the appointment. Write them down. Ring the number on the letter and ask what the third line means, because that is what the number is for, and a person with training can tell you in ninety seconds what forty readings have not.

That is the difference this whole page turns on. Asking a qualified person is not what has been costing you. Asking a page for a promise it cannot make is.

You are not being punished with silence for wanting to know. Scripture says if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, James 1:5, and upbraideth not means He does not tell anybody off for asking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives without ever making a frightened person feel foolish.

The psalm is somebody putting something down

There is a short psalm, three verses long, written by a man who was not naturally a quiet person.

Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.Psalm 131:1-2

Read what he is actually describing, because it is not humility in the vague sense.

Things too high for me. Not things beneath him. Things above his reach: matters whose outcome is genuinely not in his hands and never was.

And then the strange image. As a child that is weaned. A weaned child is not a child who has stopped needing its mother. It is a child who can be near her without demanding the thing it used to demand of her. It has stopped treating her presence as a supply line and started simply being with her.

That is what he says his soul is like.

Now hold that against a letter you have read forty times. You have been going to that page the way an unweaned child goes to a breast: for something specific, urgently, and with a demand. And the page has nothing to give, so you go back, and the going back has become the thing itself.

You are not required to keep going to a source that cannot supply you. Scripture says surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is weaned of his mother, Psalm 131:2, and the quieting is described as something he did rather than something that happened to him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a demand loosen its grip in a person's chest.

What the re-reading has cost you

Let me be plain about it, because you have been treating it as free. Scripture holds that ground in Psalm 131:1-2, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

Each reading takes about four minutes. Forty of them is more than two hours, which is not much. That is not the cost.

The cost is that every reading re-opens the fear at full strength. You have not had one clear hour since that envelope came, because you have never let the thing settle for long enough to be somewhere else. It has been read in the kitchen, so the kitchen has it. Read in the car, so the car has it. Read in a car park, so now a supermarket has it. This rests on Scripture in Psalm 131:1-2, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

You have distributed it through your whole life, four minutes at a time. Scripture already said it in Psalm 131:1-2, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

And there is one more cost, which is harder to see. The re-reading gives you a feeling of doing something. That feeling is why it is so hard to stop, and it is entirely false: nothing is being done. Not one word of that letter has moved in six days.

You are not doing anything by reading it again. Scripture says be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God, Philippians 4:6, and made known is the whole action rather than the first step of one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a thing off a table it has been sitting on all week.

The waiting is the actual thing

Here is what nobody says to a person in your week.

You are not in an information problem. You are in a waiting problem, and they feel identical from the inside, which is why intelligent people keep trying to solve the second with the tools of the first. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 131:1-2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

An information problem ends when you know. A waiting problem ends when time passes, and there is nothing whatsoever you can do to hurry it, and every attempt to hurry it becomes another reading of the same page.

That is why nothing you have tried has worked. You have been applying reading to a thing that is not short of reading. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 131:1-2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

What waiting needs is not knowledge. It is company, and it is somewhere to put the hours, and both of those are available to you tonight in a way that a fortieth reading is not.

You are not alone in the gap between the letter and the appointment. Scripture says fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God, Isaiah 41:10, and it is a promise of company rather than of information, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in the room where the letter is.