The Crate She Sits On

The crate she sits on is the blue one with the cracked corner, and she keeps it behind the table where nobody can see her use it.

Saturday, the market, the second hour, which is the only quiet hour there is. The rush comes at eight and comes again at eleven and in between there is this: the awning rope ticking against the pole, a radio going in the stall across from her, the smell of thyme and scallion and wet cardboard, a pigeon working the ground under the fish table with real commitment. Her scale sits at the end of the table with a thumbprint on the glass. Her apron pocket is heavy on one side with coins and light on the other because that is the side with her phone in it, and she has stopped taking her phone out.

She sits down on the crate. Elbows on knees, back curved, the way a person sits when they have twenty minutes and no plan for them.

And here is what the second hour is really for. It is for the people who love her.

They come by. They have been coming by for months now. Mrs. Aggie from two rows over, who brings her a coffee and never lets her pay. The young couple from church who always buy more callaloo than two people can eat. Her cousin's friend who calls her Auntie though she is nothing of the kind. And every single one of them, God bless every single one of them, says some version of the same beautiful sentence. Keep believing. Don't let go. God has got you. He is going to come through.

She says thank you. She says amen. She smiles the smile, which she has gotten very good at, the one that closes the subject kindly so that nobody has to feel awkward.

Because here is what she cannot say out loud on a Saturday morning with a line forming: that sentence used to be a hand on her back and now it is a sound. It is not their fault. It is not that they are wrong. It is that it has been said to her perhaps two hundred times and nothing has been decided about her body in all that time, and somewhere in the two hundredth telling the sentence stopped being comfort and became a small piece of work she has to do, a face she has to arrange, a thank you she has to find the energy for while a woman waits to be handed her change.

That is you, perhaps, on your own crate behind your own table, with your face arranged and your phone in the light pocket. You have run out of ways to say thank you. And underneath the politeness there is a thing you have never once said in a room with people in it: nothing has been decided, nobody has told you anything, and you do not know how to be in the presence of God with your hands this empty.

The kindest sentence in the world, said one time too many

I want to be careful here, because those people are not the problem and I am not going to let this page turn them into it. They love her. They came. Most people do not come.

But something happens to a sentence when it arrives on its own two hundred times. Keep believing, handed over with nothing else in it, quietly puts the whole weight back on the person who is already carrying it. It sounds like company and it lands like a task. And a woman who has been given the same task two hundred times will start to wonder whether the reason nothing has been decided is that she has not done the task well enough.

So let me take that out of the room right now, plainly, because it is a lie and it does real harm. Nobody failed to have enough faith here. Nothing about your body is a report card on your believing. That sentence is not in the book, it is not true, and you may put it down where you are sitting.

Here is what is written instead. Paul is at the end of a long argument and he starts naming everything he can think of that might get between a person and God, and he keeps going until he runs out of categories.

Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:39

Read the list slowly, because the list is the point. Height. Depth. Any other creature. He goes up as far as up goes and down as far as down goes and then he throws in everything else that exists, and every one of those things is stronger than a Saturday morning at a market. And not one of them can put you outside the love of God.

You are held in this stretch, and it is not a hallway He steps out of while you wait in it. Romans 8:39 is written and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes what is written land in a person, and neither the written word nor His Spirit says anything about you being held only once there is news.

What is not on the list

Now look at what Paul does not name, because it is the thing you have been quietly afraid of.

He does not say: nor a verdict. He does not say: nor an unanswered stretch, nor a fourth month with nothing decided, nor a woman who has run out of ways to say amen. Those are not on the list because they were never candidates. The list is made of the strongest things in creation and none of them qualified.

And I am not going to do the thing you have had done to you. I am not going to explain your delay. I do not know why nothing has been decided and I will not pretend to; I will not tell you it is building something in you, I will not hand you a missing key you have not turned, and I will not quietly redefine the word healing at the end of this page so that I can tell you that you got it after all. That last one is the cruelest of the four and it is the most common.

You have His love with nothing decided, and that is not a smaller thing than an answer. The word does not make His nearness conditional on news, and His Spirit is called the Comforter for the stretch, not for the celebration afterward.

Let me say the true thing about God and the true thing about me in one breath, because they belong together and neither one is honest without the other. God heals. He has never stopped, He is doing it in the world today, and what is written about His kindness to human bodies is not poetry. And I do not promise you an outcome. I will not tell you what happens next with your body, because I do not know and because the moment I promise it I have made your body the proof of my sentence instead of leaving it in the hands of the One it belongs to. What He does with it is His to decide, and He is good in either case.

Distance has no right to stay between you and the God whose written word says that nothing in the whole of creation separates you from His love. Not the silence, not the length of it, not the smile you had to arrange this morning. His Spirit is in you and He did not move out when the news stopped coming.

And one more thing, said plainly because I mean it. If this stretch has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking that the people at your table would have a lighter time of it without you, tell one human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you tonight. A page cannot be that person. You deserve somebody in the room with you, and there is nothing shameful in saying so.