Half Of This Belonged To Somebody Gone

There is a box in a cupboard in your house and you have opened it twice in six years.

Both times briefly. Both times you were looking for something else, and you found the box instead, and you opened it, and you looked at the top layer without lifting anything out, and you closed it again and put it back exactly where it had been.

You know what is in it. You could list most of it.

And there is a great deal more of it out in the open. That chair. The dishes you use on Sundays and are slightly careful with. The lamp. The clock that has not worked since before she died and that nobody has ever suggested getting fixed.

You live in a house where a substantial number of the objects belonged to somebody who is not here.

And there are two things that get said to you about this, and both of them are useless.

The first is that you should let some of it go. That you are holding on, that it is not healthy, that she would not want you surrounded by her things. Whoever says this is usually kind and is always wrong about what would help, and it makes you protective, and it is why you have not talked about it much.

The second is the opposite, that of course you should keep everything, said in a soft voice by somebody who is uncomfortable and wants the subject closed.

Neither of those is about you. They are both about how other people feel standing in your house.

So I am not going to tell you to let anything go. Nothing here will ask you to sort, thin out, decide or move on, and if that is what you were braced for you can stop bracing.

I want to look at something else entirely, which is the difference between a thing that is kept and a thing that is stored.

What mean ye by these stones

There is a moment in Joshua where twelve stones get carried out of a riverbed and set up, and the reason given for it is unusual.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? (Joshua 4:6, King James Version)

That this may be a sign among you.

Now notice what those stones are not for. They are not for the men who carried them. Those men were there. They walked through the riverbed themselves and they do not need a reminder of it.

The stones are set up for a question that has not been asked yet, by children who were not born, in a time nobody in that scene will see.

And notice where they are put. Not buried, not stored, not laid up somewhere safe. Set up. Standing in the open, in the way, where a child walking past will see them and ask.

Because a stone in a box prompts nothing. A stone standing in the open makes somebody say what is that, and then the story gets told, and the telling is the entire purpose of the arrangement.

That is the distinction I want to put beside your box.

A kept thing is out where it does its work. A stored thing is safe and silent, and the person it belonged to does not come up, because nothing in the room prompts anybody to ask.

You are able to set a thing in the open where it does its work, and a box has never once been able to do that for anybody. Joshua 4:6 sets the stones up for a question that has not been asked yet, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present where a story gets told rather than preserved.

Storing is not the same as keeping

Here is the honest part, and it is not a criticism, because there was a good reason for it.

Things went into boxes at a time when you could not look at them.

That was right. In the first year you could not have had her handwriting on the kitchen wall, and putting it away was not avoidance, it was survival, and anybody who has been through it knows that.

But the boxes stayed, because nobody ever schedules the day when it becomes bearable. There is no moment where a person says: I am ready now. It just becomes slightly less impossible, over years, without announcing itself, and the boxes are still in the cupboard because there was never a day to move them.

And the cost of that is specific and worth naming. The things in the open are the things that get talked about. Nobody in your family has asked about anything in that box, because they do not know it exists. Which means those particular stories are not being told, and there are people in your house who will never hear them, not because anybody decided that, but because the objects that would have prompted the questions are in a cupboard.

That is the loss inside the loss, and it is the only one still available to do anything about.

You are holding stories that nobody has been given the chance to ask for, and storing has never once been the same as keeping. The written word sets the memorial up in the open for a question, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a story is told rather than kept.

One thing, out where you can see it

So here is the assignment, and notice its size.

Move one thing you kept out of storage and put it where you can see it.

One. Not the box. Not sorting. Not a decision about the rest of it, now or ever. This assignment does not concern the rest of it at all.

Choose something small. Something that will not ambush you every time you walk past, because you know which of those things would and this is not the day for that one.

Put it somewhere in the ordinary traffic of the house. A shelf you pass, the kitchen windowsill, beside where you sit. Somewhere you will see it without going to look.

And then leave it there for a while. Long enough that it stops being an event and becomes part of the room.

You may find that somebody asks about it. That is the stones doing what stones do, and if it happens, tell them. And you may find nobody asks at all, and that is fine too, because the first person it is set up for is you.

You are able to move one thing into the open without deciding anything about the rest, and it has never once required you to be finished grieving. Joshua 4:6 puts the stones where a child will walk past them and ask, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman lifting one object out of a cupboard.