Taped Inside The Cupboard Door

The ink has gone brown and the tape has gone yellow and the card has curled at one corner, and the eleven words on it say exactly what they said the day she wrote them.

The cupboard above the kettle. Morning. The door has been opened perhaps ten thousand times and it opens the way an old door opens, which is not smoothly and not badly, just familiarly, with a small resistance at the top that the whole family knows about and nobody has ever fixed.

Inside: mugs, two that match and four that do not. A tin. The jar with the elastic bands.

And on the inside of the door, at eye level for a woman of her height, an index card.

She wrote it in the fall of a very hard year, with a biro that was running out, which is why the first two words are darker than the rest. She used the tape that was in the drawer, which was parcel tape, which is why it has held for decades and gone the color of weak tea.

She has not consciously read it in years. That is not neglect. It is what happens to a thing you have looked at ten thousand times: it stops being read and starts being present, the way a doorframe is present.

But this morning she is standing there with a mug in her hand and everything in her is out of shape, for reasons that have been building since about February and that she does not want to lay out.

And she looks at it. Actually looks. And it says exactly what it said.

That is the whole event. Nothing else happens. She gets the mug out and shuts the door.

That is you, and your card might be a screenshot you never delete, a verse on a fridge magnet, a line somebody wrote in the front of a book they gave you.

Two plain things before anything else. If somebody in your life is frightening you or hurting you, nothing here is telling you to stand there and absorb it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

Isaiah puts two things beside each other and lets you look

There is a sentence that does not argue. It puts two things next to each other and stops.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.Isaiah 40:8

Notice that the first half is granted without a fight.

The grass does wither. The flower does fade. He is not saying otherwise, he is not softening it, and he is not telling anybody that things last longer than they do. Whatever has been going on since February, and whatever has thinned out in it, Isaiah is not in the business of denying that any of it is thinning.

That matters, because a verse that started by disputing the fading would be useless to a woman at a cupboard. She has evidence. She can see the ink.

And then the but, and it is not a contradiction, it is a second fact placed beside the first one. The grass withers. The word stands. Both are true at once and they are true about different things.

You are standing on the half of that verse that does not fade, and it has not thinned since February. That is not a soothing phrase at a kettle: Isaiah 40:8 grants the withering in full and then states the standing without qualification, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a standing thing hold under a woman whose own shape has gone rather than the amount of steadiness anybody can find before breakfast.

The ink faded and the words did not

Here is the thing worth noticing about that card, and it is not a metaphor somebody put on afterward. It is what actually happened.

The ink faded. The tape yellowed. The card curled. Everything physical about that piece of paper has been degrading steadily for decades, exactly as Isaiah says it does.

And the eleven words have not changed by one letter.

That is because the words were never made of ink. The ink was carrying them, and the ink is grass, and the words are not. A different card in a different kitchen in a different country in a different century says the same eleven words, and every one of those cards is going brown, and none of that has ever been an event in the life of the sentence.

You have been holding on to something the fading has never once reached. The written word grants the withering and then declares the standing, and the Spirit of God is the one making that hold in a real kitchen, never the condition of the paper or of the woman reading it.

And nobody here is telling you that what you feel this morning is a lie. It is not. Something has genuinely thinned since February and you are not imagining it and this article is not going to tell you to feel differently about it. What is on offer is not a correction to your feelings. It is a second thing that is also true, on a card, at eye level, that has not moved.

There is no key here and no technique. Nothing on this page is a method for making a verse work, because a method can be performed badly and that would put the whole weight back on you.