It Is Not Coming Back

Manaia has not been allowed to finish that sentence in three years.

He tries, occasionally, and it never gets to the end. He starts it and somebody, always kindly, always fast, arrives with the second half he did not want.

It is not coming back.

That is the sentence. Six words about his shoulder and his back and the twenty-two years before them, and every time he begins it somebody says: but you can still, and then a list.

The list is accurate. He can still do a great many things. He drives, he works, he is not in a chair, he goes out on other people's boats and he is useful when he is on them and everybody is glad he is there.

That is not what he is talking about.

He was in the water and on the water for twenty-two years. That was not his hobby and it was not his job either, exactly. It was what his days were made of, from before he can remember, and his father before that, and the whole of how he understood himself was a man who goes out.

And there was a bad six months and then a bad decision by somebody who was tired, and now there is a thing his shoulder does at a certain angle and a thing his back does after about forty minutes, and two specialists have said the same careful sentence in slightly different words.

It is not coming back.

Three years, and he has never once said those six words out loud all the way through to another human being.

His nephew was the one, in the end, and he was not trying to be anything.

They were sitting on the ramp with a flask at the end of a day, and the boy, who is nineteen and does not manage people yet, said, "Do you miss it?"

And Manaia said, "It is not coming back."

And the boy said, "Yeah."

And then he did not say anything else. He just looked at the water and drank his tea.

They sat there about twenty minutes.

Manaia said afterward, to his wife, that he did not know a conversation could go like that.

Now let me ask you when somebody last let you finish it.

Because if this is yours, there is a sentence with a full stop at the end of it, and every person who loves you has been supplying a comma instead, for years, out of love, and it has left you completely alone with the actual fact.

Remembering first

Everybody quotes the middle of Lamentations 3 and almost nobody reads the four verses before it.

Remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and bitterness. Surely my soul remembers and is bowed down within me.Lamentations 3:19 to 20

Surely my soul remembers and is bowed down within me.

That is the man's own description of what remembering does to him. It bows him down. He is not saying it lightly and he is not saying it as a stage he has passed through.

And this is the verse that comes immediately before the famous one.

This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. The Lord's lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning.

Look at the order.

The recalling comes first, and the recalling is not skipped and it is not tidied. He remembers the affliction, in full, by name, and says out loud that it bows him down, and only then does he reach for the other thing.

And notice what the hope is actually about. It is not that the city is coming back. It does not come back; the book ends without it. What he names is God's own steadfast love and mercy, arriving daily, in a ruin that stays a ruin for the length of the book.

So hear this said over you, sitting on a ramp with a flask going cold. You are permitted to say the permanent thing out loud with a full stop after it, and remembering it in full is what the man in Lamentations does before he says one word about hope. That is written in the four verses everybody skips, and it is the Holy Spirit who intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, and He does that in a man who has nothing to add after the six words.

Now let me be careful about two things, and I mean careful, because both of them are ways of taking this off you.

I am not going to tell you what God is doing with your shoulder.

Not a reason, not a purpose, not a lesson, not something you were meant to learn. I do not know and nobody does, and a man who hands you a purpose for your own body has taken something that costs him nothing and charged you for it.

And I am not going to tell you it might come back.

You have had two specialists and you know what you know, and hope handed to somebody about a thing that is finished is not kindness, it is a way of ending the conversation early.

Here is what has actually been happening for three years.

Everybody who interrupts you is protecting themselves.

The full stop at the end of your sentence is unbearable to them. A comma is survivable: but you can still, but there are other things, but look at everything you have got. Every one of those is true and every one of them is a door out of the room, and they take it, because standing in a room with a permanent loss and nothing to offer is one of the hardest things a person is ever asked to do.

Your nephew could do it because he is nineteen and did not know he was supposed to help.

And here is what it has cost you: you have concluded, without deciding it, that the fact itself is not sayable. And a fact that cannot be said gets carried alone, and you have carried it alone through three years of being told how much you can still do.

The word says He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, and binds up is what you do to a thing that is actually injured rather than a thing you have talked somebody out of. And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness, and weakness there is the plain word for not having the strength, which is what you do not have.