Nobody Has Ever Said Anything About It

Thirty-one years, and Roy cannot think of one thing anybody has ever said about it.

Not unkindly. Nobody has ever criticized it either. It is simply that in thirty-one years, at no wedding, no anniversary, no family gathering, has anybody looked at the two of them and remarked on it.

They have been fine. That is the word, and he is aware how it sounds.

There have been two hard stretches. One about money, over four years, that they came out of. One that was about something else, in the middle, and they came out of that too, and they came out of it without a scene and without anybody outside the house knowing about it.

And that is the whole of the record.

It came up at a funeral in the winter.

A couple from that church, and she had nursed him for a long time, and there were things said about her at the front that made a room of people cry.

And Roy sat there and was glad about all of it and meant it.

And then he thought, quite plainly and without much feeling attached: there is nothing to say about us.

Not a complaint. He does not want a crisis and he would not swap. It was more like a man noticing the shape of a thing for the first time. Whatever it is that makes a marriage worth mentioning, they have not got it, and thirty-one years have gone past without producing any.

His son got married in the summer.

And a few weeks before, on the porch, the boy asked him for advice.

And Roy had nothing.

He genuinely tried. He sat there and went looking for something and there is no crisis to draw on and no lesson he could name, because nothing happened, and the two things that did happen are not things you tell your son about.

And in the end he said, badly, and slightly embarrassed: "I do not know. We just kept turning up."

That was it. That was the entire body of advice.

And the boy put it in his speech.

He said it out loud, in a room, and said it came from his father, and Roy has never been so uncomfortable in his life.

And the room went quiet in a way Roy did not expect.

Not moved exactly. Something more like recognition, and afterward three separate people came and said something to him about it, and one of them was a man his own age who did not really say anything, just gripped his arm.

Now let me ask you what anybody would say about yours.

Because if this is yours you have just tried to think of something and come up empty, and you have concluded from that emptiness a thing you have never said out loud.

Green in old age

There is a psalm about trees and the point of it is the timing.

The righteous man will flourish like the palm tree, he will grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still yield fruit in old age; they shall be full of sap and very green.Psalm 92:12 to 14

Planted. Not visiting. Not passing through. Planted is a word about a thing that stays in one place and is not moved, and everything that follows depends on it.

And then the line that matters here.

They will still yield fruit in old age; they shall be full of sap and very green.

Notice what is not promised. Not: they will produce early. Not: they will be spectacular. Not: people will remark on them.

The picture is a tree that is still going, still full of sap, still green, decades in. That is the whole image, and it is the image the psalm chose for a righteous life, and there is nothing dramatic in it anywhere.

A palm and a cedar are both slow. A cedar of Lebanon takes forty years to look like anything and several hundred to become what it is famous for. Anybody watching one for a decade would report that nothing was happening.

So hear this said over you, sitting on a porch with nothing to offer your son. Thirty-one years of turning up is exactly the picture Scripture reaches for when it wants to describe a righteous life, and the emptiness you found when you went looking for a story was never evidence about the marriage. That is written into a psalm about slow trees still green in old age, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one at work in a believer to will and to do, and He has been at work in a house nobody outside ever had occasion to mention.

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to make the dramatic ones smaller to make you feel better.

That woman nursed her husband for years and the things said about her at that funeral were true. She did something hard and public and costly and it deserved every word.

And this category is not a competition and there is no scoring. If God gave somebody a story, He gave them a story, and there is nothing in Scripture that suggests He is more pleased with a quiet life than a loud one. He simply gives different ones.

Here is what I am telling you.

You have been reading the absence of a story as the absence of a thing.

They are not the same. A story requires an event, and an event requires something to go wrong or something to be overcome, and you have had thirty-one years in which the hard bits were handled inside the house by two people who did not stop.

There is no anecdote in that. There is no anniversary speech in it. And there are two people in their fifties who know exactly where the other one is on a Tuesday, and a son who has never once had to wonder about his parents, and a room full of people who went quiet when he said six words.

That last bit is worth staying with. They did not go quiet because it was clever. They went quiet because most of them are trying to do the same thing and hardly anybody ever names it out loud.

The word says the righteous are planted and still bear fruit in old age, and that is God choosing the slowest possible picture on purpose. And the Spirit of God is the one who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure, which puts thirty-one years of turning up on His side of the page rather than on yours.