The Thing You Stopped Mentioning

In the first year you told everybody.

You told them because it was enormous, and because that is what a person does with a thing they are hoping for. You told friends, you told the two people at work who you trust, you told the woman who prays with you on a Tuesday. People asked how it was going and you gave them the whole answer, with the detail in it, because the detail was where the hope lived.

In the second year you told the people who asked. That was still most of them. The asking got careful in the middle of that year, and you learned to make it easy for people by getting there first with something light.

In the third year you developed the short version. You know the one. Six or seven words, delivered evenly, with a small closing note on the end so that the subject can be set down politely by both parties. Yes, still waiting, we will see. Something like that. You said it hundreds of times and it worked every single time, which is exactly what made it dangerous.

And now it is the fourth year, and nobody asks.

Not out of unkindness. Nobody in your life is cold and nobody has forgotten you. It is simply that four years is a long time in other people's lives too, and the ones who loved you enough to ask in year one have had their own year one and year two since then. Some of them assume it resolved. Some assume you have made your peace. And you have never corrected either assumption, because correcting it would mean explaining, and explaining would mean bringing it back out into the light, and it has been in the dark so long now that you are not sure it would survive the handling.

So here is where you actually are, and it should be said plainly, because nobody has said it to you.

The thing is still completely alive. It has not diminished. It is the first thing your mind goes to when you wake at four, and the thing that arrives sideways in a supermarket aisle, and the reason a particular song is difficult. It is exactly as large as it was in the first year. And it is now entirely absent from every conversation you have with every person who knows you.

That is a particular kind of loneliness, and it does not have a name. It is not grief, because nothing has ended. It is not disappointment, because you have not given up. It is carrying something enormous through rooms full of people who love you, and setting it down in none of them.

You know the fourth year.

What the silence has and has not done

Let me say first what four years of not mentioning something has actually cost, because it is worth naming accurately.

It has cost you company. That is the real damage, and it is the whole of it. The hope has not been damaged; hope does not rot from lack of mention. What has happened is that a load which two or three people were helping you carry in year one is now being carried by one person in a house full of good people who have no idea.

And I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that would tell you the silence was a mistake and that you should have kept talking. The short version built in year three was not cowardice. It was a kindness done for other people, and a small mercy done for yourself, because there is only so many times a person can watch a friend's face change.

My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.Psalm 130:6

He says it twice. That is not a poetic flourish, it is a man leaning on a phrase because the first pass did not carry the weight.

Watchmen on a wall in the last hour of a night are not hoping for the morning. They are not lying awake wondering whether the sun has changed its mind about them. They are simply awake in the dark, with the whole thing still ahead, doing the only thing there is to do, which is to keep facing east.

And notice what the psalmist's soul is actually waiting for. Not the outcome. The Lord. Which puts the whole weight of the waiting on a Person rather than on an event.

You are waiting on a Person, and that is not the same as waiting on an outcome you cannot control. Scripture puts the soul's waiting on the Lord Himself and not on the thing hoped for, and Psalm 130 says it twice for a reason. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person steady in the fourth hour of a watch, and He has never once told a watchman that the night was his fault.

Where the anchor is fastened

Now the part that changes what four years means.

Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.Hebrews 6:19

Read where the anchor goes. Not down into the seabed. Not into the circumstance, not into a date, not into an outcome that may or may not arrive. It goes up and in, through the veil, into the place where God is. That is the strangest and best picture of hope in the whole of Scripture, and it is precisely why hope can survive a fourth year without becoming denial.

An anchor fastened to your outcome would have been dragging for four years. An anchor fastened inside the veil has not moved an inch since the first week.

You have an anchor, and four years of silence has never been able to reach where it is fastened. Scripture calls that hope sure and stedfast and puts it inside the veil rather than in the visible world, and Hebrews 6:19 is describing something that holds regardless of what the surface is doing. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact about a person rather than a comforting image.

And there is one more, and it is the one for the specific fear you have not said out loud.

And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.Romans 5:5

The fear in the fourth year is rarely about the thing itself. It is about becoming a person who still hopes for something everybody else has quietly filed away. It is the fear of being the one who has not caught up with their own life, of being naive, of being an object of gentle pity at somebody else's table.

You are not put to shame for still wanting it. Scripture says hope maketh not ashamed and grounds that in the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit, so the guarantee is His and not a matter of how things turn out. The Holy Spirit was given, in the past tense, before any of this started, and He has been in every one of the four years with you.