The Year The Marriage Ended

I want to say something early that I would say sitting on a chair beside you rather than standing up in front of you.

Some of the state of that house is grief and some of it is capacity, and I think a piece of it is also an argument.

Because when a marriage ends, a house stops being a house for a while and becomes an exhibit. And the exhibit is making a case, and the case is one of two things.

It is either: look what this did to me. Or it is: look, I am fine, everything is normal here.

And both of those are being presented to somebody who is not in the room and is never coming back into the room, and that is what makes it so exhausting. A person can keep a house going for other people. Nobody can keep a house going for a jury that does not sit.

I do not say that as a criticism. That case was the last piece of the relationship that was still live, and letting it drop feels like conceding something. I understand exactly why it is still running.

He healeth the broken in heart

There is a line in the Psalms that has one word in it I want to look at carefully.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. (Psalm 147:3, King James Version)

Bindeth up.

That is not a word about a fast recovery. Binding up is what you do to something that is going to take time. It is the bandage, not the cure. It is the acknowledgment that there is an actual wound, that it will not close today, and that it needs holding while it does.

And notice what surrounds that verse. Read the psalm around it and it is about God counting the stars and calling them by name, and gathering the outcasts, and building up a city. Enormous things. And straight into the middle of that goes a line about bandaging a person's heart.

The same God doing both, in one sentence, with no change of tone.

You are not too small a case for this, and Psalm 147:3 has never once put a broken heart below the notice of the one who names the stars. It is written that He bindeth up their wounds, which assumes a long healing rather than a quick one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the binding rather than standing back waiting for a recovery.

You have been holding a house together as an argument while the actual wound went unbound. The word puts the healing and the binding in the same breath as the counting of stars, and the Spirit of God is the one who tends a thing that is going to take years.

The case is over and the house is still testifying

Now here is the piece I want you to have, and I want to be gentle with it.

Whatever the house is saying, nobody is listening.

If it is saying look what this did to me, the person it is addressed to is not here and would not read it correctly if they were. If it is saying I am fine, the same is true.

You have been keeping an exhibit for a room with nobody in it, and no house on earth has ever once been able to argue a case to somebody who is not there. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person set down a proceeding that closed years ago, and Psalm 147:3 binds a wound instead of weighing an argument.

So the house is doing an enormous amount of work for an audience of nobody, and the person paying for that work every single day is the one who lives there, in a currency of tiredness and shame. A house is a record of what a year cost, and it is not a verdict on the man standing in it.

And the strange mercy in that is this. If nobody is listening, then the house can stop testifying, and nothing at all is lost. No case is conceded because there is no case being heard.

You were never keeping a house badly, and what you were doing was maintaining evidence in a proceeding that closed some time ago. Psalm 147:3 attends to the wound itself rather than to the argument around it, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person set down a case nobody is judging.

So tonight I want the two facts written down, because those are what is actually true.

You are permitted to name the month it ended and put the house beside it, and doing that has never once been the same as blaming anybody. It is written that He binds up wounds rather than closing them instantly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in an honest account written at a kitchen table.

Write down the month it ended

So here is the whole of it.

Write down the month it ended. Not the month the papers came, unless that was the month. The month it actually ended, which is often earlier and which you know.

Underneath, write what your days turned into after that. Facts. Working more. Sleeping badly. The children two nights a week. Not cooking. Whatever it was.

Then read the two lines together.

Nothing gets cleaned tonight.

You are able to write those two lines tonight, and writing them has never once required you to have forgiven anybody first. Psalm 147:3 binds a wound without asking whose fault it was, and the Spirit of God is present at a table with a pen exactly as He is in a house that is running well.