I Went Out Full and Came Back Empty

The key still worked. That was the first thing, and it took the legs out from under her before she got the door open: the same lock, the same slightly wrong angle you have to hold it at, twenty nine years later.

Two suitcases. That is what she brought back, and one of them is mostly papers.

She is sixty eight. She left this house at thirty nine with a life packed into a hired van and a person driving it, and she has come back at sixty eight with two cases and a taxi. The house was her mother's and then it was empty and then it was rented and now it is hers, which is a sentence about paperwork and not about anything else.

She has been sitting in the front room for about an hour now, in her mother's chair, in her coat, with the cases where the driver put them.

And the thing going round in her is not grief exactly, and it is not shame, though there is some of that. It is the arithmetic of what she has to show. Twenty nine years, and the honest answer is two suitcases, one of them papers.

She has been rehearsing what she will say when the neighbors come, and they will come, because in this town they always come, and one of them will ask, kindly, what she has been up to all this time. And she has been putting sentences together in her head for an hour and none of them work, and every attempt ends with her deciding to be vague and cheerful, and she is so tired of being vague and cheerful that she could lie down on the floor.

The light in this room at four o'clock is exactly what it was. That is the cruelty of a house. Nothing has agreed to move on.

You have come back somewhere. It might not be a house. It might be a job you left and came back to, a church, a town, a family you walked away from and are now sitting in the middle of. And you have your two suitcases, and you have your vague and cheerful answer ready. There is a woman in Scripture who came back to her own town after a long time away, and what she did on arrival is the opposite of vague, and nobody in the book corrects her for it.

She said it out loud in the town square

I have to be careful here, and more careful than usual, because there is a version of this that arrives with an explanation for twenty nine years. God was doing something. You needed to go. It brought you back. I am not going to say any of it. Scripture does not explain her years, and putting God's name on a reason I invented would be worse than saying nothing at all.

What Scripture does instead is give her a woman who names it.

Naomi comes back to Bethlehem after ten years away, and the whole town turns out, and they say is this Naomi, and she stops them. Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again empty (Ruth 1:20-21).

Read what she does. She says her own emptiness out loud, in public, on the day she arrives, in front of everybody who knew her before. She does not say things have been difficult. She says empty, and she says it about herself, and she attributes it to God, and the text does not correct her, does not soften her, and does not have anybody tell her she is being negative.

You are allowed to say the true sentence out loud, and saying it is not faithlessness. That is not me stretching the passage; Ruth 1:21 is Naomi's own words preserved in her own mouth, and the Holy Spirit who inspired the book left them standing without a footnote.

And notice what the book does next. It does not rebuke her and it does not immediately fix anything. It just keeps going. The next line says that Ruth came with her, and that they came at the beginning of the barley harvest, and the story continues around a woman who has just said she is empty.

I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the LORD hath testified against me?Ruth 1:21

Vague and cheerful is the expensive option

Now the thing that has actually been happening in that chair for an hour.

She has been building a version for the neighbors, and the version is a wall, and the wall will work, and the price of it is that she will live in this town for whatever years are left inside a story she does not believe.

Naomi did not pay that price. She paid a different one, which was standing in front of people who remembered her at thirty nine and saying the word empty, and that is not a small thing to do and it is nothing like negativity.

You have permission to be known as you actually are in this house. Psalm 51:6 says God desires truth in the inward parts, and the inward parts are exactly where the vague and cheerful version does not reach; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) is not asking for a better version.

This is yours right now, in your mother's chair with your coat still on: a God who is not waiting for the presentable account. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and nigh is a word about distance and not about tidiness; the Spirit who inspired that psalm is nearer to a woman with two suitcases than He would be to her better story.

What she is actually afraid of

Let me name the sentence, because it is not embarrassment about the neighbors.

It sounds like this: if I say it plainly, they will agree with me, and then it will be true. That is the fear. It is why she has been rehearsing for an hour, and she has not said it to a living soul, and there is no living soul in this town she has said anything to for twenty nine years.

You were not emptied of the thing that actually holds you. Psalm 73:26 says my flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever, and the psalmist grants the failing and then names what did not fail; the Holy Spirit who inspired that line did not require him to argue with the first half.

Fruit is not output, and two suitcases are where the difference is starkest. Output is what came back with her, and it is a coat, some clothes and a box of papers. Fruit is what grew on a woman over twenty nine years she cannot summarize, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that longsuffering and part of it gentleness, and none of it went in a case.

And I am not going to tell you those years were for something. I do not know why they went the way they went. What can be said, and only this, is that a woman in Scripture said the same word about herself out loud, and the Spirit who inspired the book kept her sentence in it.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes the kettle takes, tell Him one ordinary thing out of those twenty nine years, something with no result attached to it at all. A street. A window. Somebody's kitchen. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody weighs that.