I Stopped Because He Left

You were learning it for him, and he is not here, and the book has not been opened since.

That is the whole of it and it does not need a long explanation. It was always for him. His family, his mother, the things he said on the phone to his brother that you wanted to be inside rather than beside.

And when that ended, the book on the table stopped meaning anything, and you did not so much decide to stop as find that there was nothing there.

Here is the question you have not been able to answer, and it is the reason this is still open in you eight months later.

You do not know whether you actually want it.

Not whether you can. Whether you want it, in yourself, with him out of it. And every time you try to answer that question you find that you cannot separate the language from the person, because the two of them arrived together and nothing in you has ever held one without the other.

I want to say the true thing before anything useful.

That is a real question and it does not have an answer available yet, and pretending otherwise would be no help to you.

So I am not going to tell you it was never really about him. It was about him, entirely, and you know the truth of your own reasons better than anybody writing to you.

And I am not going to tell you to learn it for yourself now. That sounds clean and it is a sentence about a woman who is further along than you are.

He healeth the broken in heart

There is a line in Psalm one hundred and forty seven that comes with a surprising neighbor.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. (Psalm 147:3, King James Version)

Bindeth up their wounds.

Now the first thing to see is the second verb, because people usually quote only the first. Healeth is the outcome. Bindeth up is what happens in the meantime, and binding is a slow, physical, repeated job that assumes the thing is still open.

The verse gives you both, and it does not say how long the gap between them is.

You have something being bound up right now rather than something already healed, and a wound still being dressed has never once been a wound nobody is working on. Psalm 147:3 names the binding as its own separate act, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting with a woman who has not opened a book in eight months.

Now look at what sits either side of that verse, because it is the strangest company in the psalm.

The verse before is about gathering the outcasts. The verse after is about counting the stars and calling them all by name. The broken heart sits in the middle of a passage about the sky.

Which means this is not a small pastoral aside tucked into the psalm. It is put in the same paragraph as the stars, on purpose.

You have a grief that has been placed next to the counting of the stars, and a broken heart has never once been a small item in that psalm. The Holy Spirit is the one who put the binding of a wound in the same breath as the naming of stars, and Psalm 147:3 refuses to treat it as an aside.

And here is the third thing, which is the part about not knowing what you want.

The verse does not ask the broken hearted for a plan. There is no requirement in it to know what happens next, or to have decided anything about the future, and the binding proceeds while the person has no idea what they want.

You have never once been required to know what you want in order to be attended to, and an unanswered question has never once delayed the binding of anything. Psalm 147:3 makes no demand at all of the one being bound up, and the Spirit of God is the one with a woman who cannot separate a language from a person.

The question does not have to be answered yet

Here is the practical half, and it is about the question rather than the language.

Do you want it for yourself. That question cannot be answered from where this month stands, and here is why, and it is not a failure of self knowledge.

That language has never once been held without him attached. There is no version of it in the record that is separate from a man, so there is nothing to consult. Asking whether you want it independently is asking for a report on an experience that has not happened.

The question is not unanswerable. It is just early.

You have been holding a question open that was never once possible to close from here, and an experience nobody has had yet has never once been available to report on. Psalm 147:3 binds up a wound without asking for a plan from anybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman who does not know what she wants.

You have been asked for a report on something that has never once happened yet, and an early question has never once been the same as an unanswerable one. The Spirit of God is the one with a woman who cannot separate two things that arrived together, and Psalm 147:3 binds up a wound without asking anybody for a plan.

Now here is what would actually produce the answer, and it is smaller than a decision.

About ten days of it with him not in the room. Not a commitment and not a restart. Ten days of ten words, in an ordinary week, with nothing riding on any of it.

At the end of ten days you will have had the experience you currently lack, and the question will answer itself in one direction or the other, and either answer is fine.

You have a way to find out that costs ten ordinary days, and an experiment has never once been the same thing as a commitment. Psalm 147:3 gives the binding as a process rather than a decision, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman taking ten words on a day when she does not know why.

And here is the thing about the words themselves, said plainly.

They are not his. That may be the most useful sentence in this article. The three hundred words in your head were learned in his direction, but they are not made of him, and they will work in any room in that language for the rest of your life.

He did not take them when he left. They were never in his name.

You have three hundred words that were never once in anybody else's name, and a thing learned toward a person has never once belonged to them. The Spirit of God is the one who knows exactly what is still in a woman eight months later, and the written word binds up a wound without taking anything else away.

Ten days, and no decision at the end of it

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately not a decision.

Open it once today without going back to the beginning of anything.

Ten words. Today. And then again tomorrow, and for about ten days, and nothing has to be concluded at the end of them.

This is not a restart and it is not you choosing it for yourself. It is ten days of evidence about a question you cannot currently answer.

You have ten days available that do not commit you to anything, and an experiment has never once required a woman to have decided first. Psalm 147:3 gives both the binding and the healing without putting a date on either, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman opening a book on a day she cannot explain.

And here is what to do if it hurts on day three, because it may well.

Stop for that day and go back on day four. Do not treat the hurting as the answer.

Grief moves through things unevenly, and a bad Wednesday is not information about whether you want the language, it is information about Wednesday. The binding in that verse is ongoing and it does not run to a schedule either. Then stop, because ten words is the assignment and today owes you nothing at all.

You have permission to have a bad day in the middle and keep the experiment running, and one hard Wednesday has never once been an answer to anything. The Spirit of God is the one binding up something on the days a woman cannot tell what she wants, and Psalm 147:3 sets no date on either half of what it promises.