He Did All Of This For Thirty One Years

Consuelo has driven for thirty one years and knows almost nothing about a car, and there is a very good reason for that, and the reason died in February.

Hector did all of it. Every single piece. He put gas in it on Sunday evenings without ever being asked, and the tires got looked at, and the oil got done, and when something needed doing it was done, usually before she knew there was anything to do.

She never once had to think about it. Not because she could not have. Because there was no reason to, for thirty one years, and thirty one years is a long time to have no reason to.

Now it is September and she has a car and no idea.

Here is what her seven months have actually looked like.

She has managed. She put gas in it, which she has always been able to do. She got somebody to look at the tires in April, and it went fine, and she was more frightened beforehand than the situation warranted, and she has not been back.

What she has not done is anything that requires her to know something.

And here is the part that would surprise everybody who loves her, and which she has said out loud exactly once, to her sister, in June.

It is not that she is afraid of the car.

It is that learning it feels like agreeing to something.

Every time she has picked up a manual, or watched her son in law show her a thing on his phone, or stood beside somebody at the front of the car nodding, some part of her has quietly refused, and the refusal has a sentence attached, and the sentence is: if I learn this, then he is really gone.

Because as long as she does not know, the not-knowing is a thing he filled. It has his shape. It is the exact size and outline of a man who did all of this for thirty one years.

Her sister said, "Connie, he'd be furious."

And Consuelo laughed, because that is true, and then she said, "I know," and did not do anything about it.

What the not knowing has been holding

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to guess at anything about that car, because I have not seen it and it would be no use. And I am not going to tell you what your grief should be doing by September, because there is no schedule and anyone who hands you one is selling something.

What I want to look at is the sentence in June.

Because that sentence is not silly and it is not weakness. It is the most understandable thing in this whole account, and until somebody names it plainly it will go on running the whole business quietly from underneath.

You are held by somebody who does not hand a job over and leave, and Scripture says underneath are the everlasting arms. Deuteronomy 33 puts the holding below a person rather than beside them, so it is there before anybody reaches for it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a fact about a house where one man used to do everything.

A person's absence has a shape. It is made of everything they used to do. And every time a widow takes over one of those things, that shape gets a little smaller, and the smaller it gets the more final it feels.

So the not-knowing has not been a gap. It has been a room with his name on it.

Now let me put down the verse, and I want you to notice who is speaking and what He takes on.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.Psalm 68:5

That is God naming Himself by a job.

Not describing a feeling. Not offering sympathy. He puts on a title, and the title is the exact office that has been left empty, and in the ancient world a judge of widows meant something extremely practical. It meant the one who stands up for her in the place where the business of life gets done and she has nobody to speak for her.

He is not offering to comfort her about the empty chair. He is saying the chair has an occupant.

You are not on your own in the practical business of a life, and Scripture has God taking the empty office by name rather than offering condolences. It is written that God is a father of the fatherless and a judge of the widows in His holy habitation, which is a title and a job rather than a sentiment, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a car in a driveway in September.

You have not been left to work this out alone, and the passage puts God in the specific gap rather than in general. Psalm 68 names the widow and the fatherless by their situation and not by their feelings, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient courtroom word land on an ordinary Tuesday.

Learning it does not close the room

Here is the thing I most want to hand you, and I want to hand it gently because it is the whole message.

Learning where the oil goes does not take his place. It cannot. There is no arrangement of facts about a car that occupies the ground a husband of thirty one years occupied, and the fear that it might is doing him a disservice as well as you.

He was not the man who knew about the car. He was a man who loved you, and one of the four hundred ways that came out was that he put gas in it on Sunday evenings.

You cannot lose the man by learning the task. The task was never where he lived.

You have not been keeping him by not knowing, and no verse anywhere makes remembrance depend on remaining helpless. Psalm 68 sets God in the office of the one who stands up for her while leaving her memory entirely her own, and the Spirit of God is what separates a task from a person.

And I will say the other half plainly, the way your sister did, because she was right.

He would be furious. Not with you. With the situation. A man who did all of it for thirty one years did it so that you would never have to worry, and a September spent worrying is the exact outcome he spent three decades preventing.

Learning one small piece of it is not a betrayal of that man. It is the continuation of what he was doing.

You were loved by a man for thirty one years, and nothing that happens in a driveway now can add to or subtract from that. It is written that love is strong as death and many waters cannot quench it, which is the Song of Solomon putting it outside the reach of circumstance, and His Spirit is what makes that permanence something you can lean on while you learn a small thing.