The Letter That Came Back Unopened

It came back on a Tuesday with a printed sticker across the front of it, at an angle, half over her own handwriting: not known at this address.

She had put four evenings into that letter. Four. She wrote it out twice because the first version had a sentence in it that she read back and knew was really about herself.

Her niece is thirty one. There was a falling out, and it was not between the two of them, it was between other people, and the two of them were simply on opposite sides of a wall that got built by adults who are now mostly dead. Eleven years. She has a photograph of the girl at nine, holding a fish, absolutely delighted.

So she wrote the letter. And it was a good letter, and it did not defend anybody, and it did not ask for anything, and it said one true thing at the end that took her the whole of the fourth evening to find.

And it came back with a sticker on it.

She is fifty two. She put it on the kitchen counter propped against the fruit bowl and it has been there eleven days, and every time she comes in to make tea it is there, at that angle, with the sticker.

And here is what has been happening in those eleven days, which is much bigger than a letter. She has started to look at everything else that way.

The years with her mother. The two friendships she has kept going almost single handed. The job where she trained four people who all left. A whole life of putting things out, carefully, at some cost, and there is a sticker on all of it now: not known at this address.

She has not said this to anybody, because said out loud it sounds like self pity and she is not a self pitying woman. She is a woman with an envelope on a counter and a conclusion spreading out from it like water.

You have that envelope. It might not be an envelope. It might be a call that went to voicemail three times, a gift that got no acknowledgement, a message you can see was read. And you have started, quietly, to generalize from it. There is a promise in Isaiah about what happens to a word that goes out, and it says something specific about where the word ends up, and it is not the address.

The word does not come back empty

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that sends her chasing. Find the new address. Ask a cousin. Try social media. I am not going to say it, and not because it would be wrong to write to somebody, but because a woman in this state will be doing it to get the sticker off her own life, and that puts the weight of eleven days on a thirty one year old who did not ask for it.

Isaiah is speaking for God and he says: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it (Isaiah 55:11).

Read where the word returns to. Unto me. The word does not come back to the sender for assessment. It goes out, it does its work, and it returns to God, and the report goes to Him.

You have sent words that went somewhere other than the envelope. That is not me stretching the promise; Isaiah 55:11 names the destination of the return and it is God, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line did not put the sender in the loop.

And notice what is being described, because it is not magic. The verse before it is about rain and snow coming down and not going back up until they have watered the earth. The image is of something absorbed rather than something acknowledged. Rain does not send a receipt. It disappears into the ground, which is what it is for.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.Isaiah 55:11

What actually came back

Let me be exact about the eleven days, because precision helps here.

An envelope came back. That is the whole of the factual content. A piece of paper traveled to a building where a person no longer lives and traveled home again. Nothing in that sequence contains any information at all about whether what she wrote was true, or good, or worth four evenings, or about what she is worth.

She knows this. Any friend would tell her this in about four seconds. And it has not made the slightest difference, because the conclusion did not arrive by reasoning and will not leave by reasoning.

You have never once had your worth returned to you in the mail. Isaiah 43:4 says you are precious in His sight and honorable, and He said it to people whose whole national situation looked like a returned envelope; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has not revised a word of it in eleven days.

This is yours right now, with a sticker at an angle on your own counter: a value that no delivery system has ever been able to assess. Luke 12:7 says the very hairs of your head are numbered, and numbering is the most detailed form of attention there is; the Spirit who carried that into the Gospel has been paying it in a kitchen for eleven days.

Why she is not allowed to know

Now the part that is hardest, and I am not going to soften it.

She is not going to find out. Not about the letter, probably, and not about the years with her mother, and not about the four she trained. That is the ordinary condition of a life spent pouring things out, and it is not a punishment and it is not a sign that the pouring was wasted.

Fruit grows in a direction. John 15:5 says the branch that abides bears much fruit and never once says the branch gets to inspect it, because fruit grows outward, into the ones it grew for. A branch that could see all its own fruit would be a branch whose fruit never left.

You were never given the harvest to look at, and the not looking is what makes it a harvest and not a display. John 15:5 puts the bearing on the branch and the seeing nowhere; the Holy Spirit does the growing, and He does it in the direction of other people.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. While the kettle does what it does anyway, tell Him about one of the four evenings you spent writing, with nothing asked for. Not a request for news. One evening at a table with a pen. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody grades that.