The Box of Photographs She Does Not Open

The hall closet has the towels on the middle shelf, the good tablecloth folded on the one under that, and on the top shelf, back against the wall where the paint is a different white, a candy tin with a rubber band around it.

She gets a towel out of that closet every day of her life. Every day of her life she sees the corner of the tin.

It has photographs in it. Her own, from ten years she can put a start and a finish on to the month. She does not open it. She has moved it twice, once to this house, and both times she carried it flat with both hands like a casserole and put it straight up on the high shelf without looking in, and she dusted around it this spring the way she does every spring, running the cloth along the shelf edge and lifting the tin an inch and setting it right back down.

Her granddaughter, who is eleven and misses nothing, stood in the hall doorway one afternoon eating a popsicle and said, "What's in the tin?"

"Old pictures."

"Can I see?"

"They're not interesting, honey."

And that was true and it was also the largest lie she has told this year, and the child went off to the yard and the woman stood in the hall a minute with a towel over her arm.

She is not confused about those years. That is the thing people get wrong when they are gentle with her. She does not need help remembering, and she is not looking for somebody to explain them to her, and she is not wondering whether she was at fault. She knows the whole shape of it, start to finish, in order. Nobody took that decade off her. She spent it. She could tell it to you in one sitting and she never will.

What is in the tin is worse than the events, anyway. What is in the tin is her face. Twenty-nine years old at a picnic table with her hair pinned up, squinting, laughing at whoever is holding the camera. That is the part she cannot have out on a shelf. Not the wreckage. The ordinary Tuesday inside the wreckage, and how alive she looks in it.

She puts the towel back on the middle shelf. She shuts the closet door. She goes and cuts up a peach for the child, and she is fine, and the tin is still up there with the rubber band on it, and it will be up there tomorrow, and she can see the corner of it from where she is standing right now.

You have one. Not a tin, maybe, and not photographs. But there is a stretch of your own life you keep where you can see the edge of it every single day, and you dust around it, and you have a short flat sentence ready for anybody who asks.

The south was a dry ditch eleven months of the year

Israel had a word for the country down below Judah. The Negev. The south. And what everybody who lived there knew about the south, without being told, is that it is a place of dry watercourses.

A wadi in the Negev is a ditch full of stones. It has banks. It has a bed. Anybody looking at it can see exactly what it was for, and there is nothing in it, and there has been nothing in it since anybody can remember, and you can walk across the bottom of it in ordinary shoes. Then the winter rain comes down off the highlands somewhere you cannot even see, and that ditch is a river inside an hour, brown and loud and moving stones the size of a stove.

The people who wrote this psalm had a decade behind them that they could put a start and a finish on. They knew what had been lost in it. And this is the prayer they made:

Turn again our captivity, O LORD, as the streams in the south.Psalm 126:4

Look at what they are asking for. Not for the ditch to be explained. Not for somebody to walk them back through how it dried up. For water. You are asking a God who turns dry watercourses into rivers, and He has never once required the ditch to justify itself first. That is not my encouragement laid over your closet door. Scripture says He turns the captivity like the streams in the south, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the pleasantness of the picture, who takes that off a page and puts it in a hallway with a towel over your arm.

And notice what the psalm does not do. It does not review the years. It does not go back through them, sorting, weighing, working out which parts were the people's own doing. It just names the dryness and asks for the flood. You have a God who deals with the whole ditch at once and does not go through it stone by stone. It is written that He turns the captivity, all of it, in one act, and it is His Spirit who makes that a fact about your ten years rather than a fine thought about somebody else's.

He does not read anybody the receipt

Now I want to be plain about the thing you are braced for, because you have been braced for it a long time and it is making you tired.

You are expecting an accounting. Somewhere in you it is settled that before those years can be handed over, they have to be gone through: named, itemized, sorted into what was done to you and what you did, with a number put on each part. That is what you think handing them over means. That is why the tin stays on the shelf. You are not protecting the memory. You are declining the audit.

There is no audit. I am not going to ask you what is in the tin, or which years those are, or how they went. I do not need it and God does not require it and nobody reading over your shoulder is entitled to it. You are handed a redemption that comes without an itemization, and the years go over whole or they do not go over at all. His word says He redeems, and redeeming was never a word about review; it is a word about a price already handled by somebody with the right to handle it, and it is the Spirit who lets a person believe that without needing to check.

And hear this, because it matters more than the rest of the paragraph. Some of what is in your ten years, you chose, standing up, in your right mind, and you have never pretended otherwise. Some of it was pressed into your hands when you were young or worn down or frightened or alone, and you have spent the years since calling all of it your own choice because that felt more honest. A pushed signature is not a signature. I am not going to sort your decade for you and I am not asking you to sort it either, and I am telling you plainly that the God who is doing the redeeming knows exactly which parts were which and has never once needed you to make the list.

What He will not do is unmake it. That tin is going to be full of the same photographs on the other side of this, and the woman at the picnic table is still going to be twenty-nine and laughing, and the decade is going to have happened. You are standing in a changed verdict over a record that stays exactly as it is, and He signed both of those with the same hand. Scripture says He turns the captivity, not that He denies there was one, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets you hold a true history and a changed verdict at the same time without one of them killing the other. The record stands. The verdict is changed.