The Quilt Still in the Frame

The frame takes up the whole front room, which it has done since the winter she started, and she has to turn sideways to get past it to the kitchen, and she has stopped noticing that she does.

Nine winters. The top is nearly done. The border is not started. There is a coffee can of thread on the sill and a thimble that belonged to somebody else, and the light comes in low across the work at this hour and shows every stitch she put in when her eyes were better. She quilts about an hour a day, some days less. It is the only hour that has not changed.

She started it the winter she first asked. That is not a thing she planned; the frame went up in January and the asking started in January and after a while she could not tell you which came first. Every stitch in that quilt has a sentence under it. The same sentence.

And here is where she is tonight, with the needle in and the thread pulled through. She has run out of ways to say it. She used to have a whole vocabulary for this. She had the long way and the short way, the way she said it in the car and the way she said it in church with her eyes open. She has used all of them up. What is left is six or seven words that have gone smooth as a creek stone, and she says them, and they sound to her like a woman knocking on a door in an empty house.

She has not stopped. That is the part nobody sees. She is at the frame. She is still asking. She just cannot make it sound like anything anymore.

That is you, perhaps, at your own frame, or your own sink, or your own end of the couch. Nine winters or two or twenty. The same sentence worn down to nothing, and a suspicion creeping in around the edges that the wearing down is itself the answer, and that the answer is about you.

The strange sentence in Isaiah

I am going to hand you one verse and then I am going to tell you what I am not going to do with it.

Isaiah is writing to people who had gone every direction but one, and in the middle of a hard chapter he sets down a sentence that has always stopped me where I stand.

And therefore will the LORD wait, that he may be gracious unto you, and therefore will he be exalted, that he may have mercy upon you: for the LORD is a God of judgment: blessed are all they that wait for him.Isaiah 30:18

Read the first four words again. The LORD will wait.

Everybody has told you that you wait on God. Nobody told you He was in the waiting too. That verse does not put Him at the far end of the hallway with His arms crossed, checking a clock, seeing how long you will keep it up. It puts Him in the room. He is waiting. Isaiah says so, and Isaiah says the word twice in the same breath, once about Him and once about you, and he uses it for both of you like it is the same activity.

You are not waiting alone in that front room, and you never have been. That is not my comfort to offer, it is what Isaiah 30:18 says about the Lord Himself, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written to a stubborn nation and lays it across a quilt frame in a low winter light.

Now here is what I will not do with that verse, and I want you to hear me be plain about it.

I will not use it to explain your delay. I do not know why. Nobody standing in front of you knows why, and anybody who tells you they do has told you something about their confidence and nothing about God. I am not going to hand your silence a reason, or a lesson, or a shape that makes it sit easier, because a reason I made up would be a lie with a kind face on it, and there have been enough of those already.

I am also not going to tell you there is a key you missed. There is no key. Nothing left unsaid, nothing said wrong, no word out of order, no forgotten sin standing in the way. If somebody has hinted at that to you, they hinted wrong. Nobody in this front room failed to have enough faith. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true.

When the words go smooth

Let me talk about the six or seven words that have gone smooth, because that is what actually brought you here.

There is a thing people believe about repeated prayer, and almost nobody says it out loud, so I will. The belief is that a prayer wears out. That saying it plain, without any dressing on it, is a lower grade of asking than the way you said it in the first year when you still had adjectives. That God is, in some quiet way, tired of hearing it.

That is not anywhere in Scripture, and the opposite is.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

Not knowing how to say it is named right there as ordinary. And the answer to it is not a better vocabulary. The answer is that the Spirit takes what is left of your sentence and carries it, and what He carries is not the seven words. It is what has been under them for nine winters.

You have a prayer being carried tonight that is bigger than the words left in your mouth. Romans 8:26 is where that is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit doing the carrying, which means the state of your wording was never the thing holding this up.

And I want to say the two hardest things on this site, and say them together, because saying one without the other is how people get hurt.

God heals. He heals bodies, He does it still, and I am not going to whisper that or hedge it, because Scripture says it plainly and so will I.

And I do not promise you the result. Not the thing that has been asked for nine winters, not any of it. I cannot promise it, I will not, and neither can anybody who wants your trust. What God does here is His to decide. And I am not going to do the other trick either, the one where a woman like me quietly changes what the word healing means so that I can tell you that you already got it in a different form and send you off feeling handled. You asked for one particular thing, and that is the thing you keep asking for, and I am not going to swap it out on you at the end.

And one more, and I mean it plainly. If nine winters has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if some part of you has found itself thinking the house would go easier without you in it, tell a living person today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988, and somebody picks up. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit at that frame with you tonight. A page cannot sit with you. A person can, and you deserve one.