This Is What Kept Me Alive

Her daughter asked her at the end of the summer what she had been reading, and she could not answer.

Not could not remember offhand. Could not answer at all. She has read most mornings this year, and she could not name one book of the Bible she has been in, and standing at the sink with a tea towel she found the blank frightening in a way she has not shaken off since.

She is sixty-four.

What is in the year: her husband's diagnosis in the second week of January. The four months of appointments. Her sister's stroke in April, which came on top of it in a way that felt almost comic if you were not living it. Selling the caravan, which sounds small and was not. And her own operation in July that everybody has agreed to describe as routine.

She has read most mornings through all of that. Twenty minutes, sometimes ten, usually before six because that is when the house is quiet and she can do it without being asked how she is.

And she cannot recall a single thing.

So the conclusion is easy and she reached it at the sink: the reading has been a habit and nothing else. Going through motions. A woman turning pages in a hard year and getting nothing off them.

What the psalm says the word did

There is a line in the middle of the long psalm that is the exact testimony of somebody in a year like yours.

This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me.Psalm 119:50

Quickened means kept alive. Made alive. Held in life.

And notice the setting he gives it. In my affliction. This is not a report from a good season, and he is not describing an illuminating morning where a verse leapt off the page. He is describing survival, and he is attributing the survival to the word.

Now notice what he does not say. He does not say I remember what it said. He does not itemize. He does not produce a list of insights received. The evidence he offers for the word having quickened him is that he is alive and speaking.

You are the one giving that testimony, and you have been reading the wrong column for evidence. That is not me making your blank year look better than it was; Psalm 119:50 puts the proof in the being kept rather than in the recalling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old line and stands it beside a woman at a sink with a tea towel.

The evidence you have not counted

Now let me put the year in front of you the way somebody outside it would see it, because you cannot see it from inside and nobody has done this for you.

January: a diagnosis. February through May: appointments, and the specific grinding fear of them. April: your sister. Summer: a sale that was not about a caravan, and an operation everybody has agreed to call routine, which is a word people use about other people's bodies.

And here you are. Reading most mornings. Still getting up before six. Still at the sink with a tea towel, worrying about whether you are doing this properly, which is itself the concern of a woman who has not stopped caring what is true.

A year like that ought to take somebody out. It takes people out.

You have been kept, and you have been reading your own survival as an unrelated fact. The written word attributes exactly that keeping to itself in the middle of affliction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying a woman through a year she cannot remember a line of.

And I want to say something about memory, because you are sixty-four and you have been quietly frightened about that too. What you are describing is not a failing mind. It is what happens to recall in a year with that much load in it. Everybody's memory of a crisis year is a blur, and the blur is a mercy as often as it is a loss.

You are not losing anything, and nothing has been failing in you this year. Scripture puts the word's work in the keeping alive rather than in the retaining, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a woman to be able to quote what held her up.