The Drawer I Did Not Open for Six Years

The handle came off in her hand, which is how it started.

It is the second drawer of the unit under the window, the one you do not open, and the handle had been loose for years, and she pulled it and it came away and the drawer stayed shut, which felt about right.

She got it open with a butter knife. And there is a heap of envelopes in there about six inches deep, and every one of them is unopened, and the postmarks go from March of one year to the winter of the year six after it.

She is forty four. She sat down on the floor with her back against the couch and started to sort them, and she got about eleven envelopes in before she stopped, because it was not the envelopes.

She had assumed, on the way down to the floor, that this was going to be about avoidance. She has told the story that way, at various times, in a light voice: there is a drawer in my house I do not open, ha ha. And she was ready for it to be about bills and about being ashamed.

What she was not ready for is that she cannot remember those years.

Not in the way people say they cannot remember. She means she sat on the floor with a postmark in her hand from a specific October and could not produce a single thing. Not a room she was in. Not a person she saw. Not one meal, one conversation, one afternoon. Six years, and she was there for all of them, and there is nothing at the address.

That is worse than the envelopes and it is much worse than the bills. She sat there with the drawer out on the carpet and the low sun coming through the window that the unit sits under, doing exactly what it does at four o'clock, and thought a sentence she has not been able to shake since: I do not know where I was.

You have a drawer. It might not be a drawer, and there might not be envelopes in it, but there is a stretch of your life the lights are off in, and you have never gone in there because you assumed the trouble was what you would find. And the trouble is the opposite. And there is a book in the middle of the Bible written by a man in exactly this position, and what he says in the middle of it is the most quoted sentence he ever wrote and almost nobody knows where it sits.

Where that verse actually lives

I have to be careful here, and especially careful, because there is a version of this that arrives with a reason for the six years. God was carrying you. You needed that time. It was a season. I am not going to say those things, and not out of coldness. Scripture does not explain her six years, and I am not going to invent an explanation and put God's name on the front of it.

Lamentations is five chapters of a man looking at a ruined city and refusing to pretend. He says his strength and his hope are perished from the Lord (Lamentations 3:18). He says God has made him drunk with wormwood. He is not writing from the far side.

And then, in the middle of the third chapter, without anything having changed, he says this: It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness (Lamentations 3:22-23).

Everybody has that verse on something. Almost nobody knows it sits in the middle of a book about a burned city, spoken by a man who has just said his hope is gone.

You are being spoken to out of the same book, in the same condition, without anything having to be fixed first. That is not me arranging the text to be kind; Lamentations 3:22 follows Lamentations 3:18 by four verses, and the Holy Spirit who preserved both of them in one chapter left the despair in.

Now count. New every morning. Six years is two thousand one hundred and ninety mornings, near enough. Every single one of them had its own mercy in it, whether or not the woman on the carpet can produce a memory of the room she woke up in.

It is of the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

The mercies did not depend on your remembering them

Here is where it lands, and it is not a comfort about memory. It is a claim about what was happening.

Two thousand one hundred and ninety mornings arrived. Each one carried something from God that was not there the day before. She has no access to any of it and never will, and not one of those mercies was withheld pending her ability to recall it later.

You were carried through mornings you have no memory of, and the carrying was not conditional on the memory. Lamentations 3:23 says new every morning without exception clauses, and the same Spirit who breathed that line was in a house she cannot picture.

This is yours right now, sitting on the carpet: a faithfulness that ran the whole six years without your attendance being recorded. Deuteronomy 31:8 says He goes before you and will be with you, He will not fail you nor forsake you, and the going before happens whether or not the person following is paying attention; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) was in every one of those Octobers.

What she is actually afraid of

Let me name the sentence under it, because it is not shame about unopened mail.

It sounds like this: if I cannot remember it, maybe I was not really there, and if I was not really there, then six years of my one life are simply gone. That is the fear, and it is why the drawer stayed shut for years, and she has said none of it out loud.

You were present for every one of those days even where you cannot find yourself in them. Psalm 139:16 says His book had all your days written before there were any of them, and the writing is His and the record is complete regardless of what you can retrieve; the Holy Spirit who inspired that psalm has never had a gap in the file.

Fruit is not output, and a drawer of unopened envelopes is an unlikely but exact place to see it. Output is what could be listed from those years, and there is nothing to list. Fruit is what grew on a woman who survived a stretch she cannot describe, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that longsuffering, and it does not require her to remember Tuesdays.

And I want to say plainly what I am not saying. I am not telling you those years were for something. I do not know why they went dark. What can be said, and only this, is that the mercies came every one of those mornings, and that the years were not outside His hand, and neither of those claims needs a reason to be true.