The Past Tense I Put Her In

Bree Tolliver has a sentence she says about Tam, and it takes about two seconds, and she has been saying it for two years.

Somebody at a table will say, "Whatever happened to Tam?" and Bree will do a small thing with her mouth, halfway between a smile and an apology, and she will say, "Tam? Oh, Tam's not really in that place anymore."

That is it. That is the whole sentence. It is kind. It is quiet. Nobody has ever asked her a follow up question, because the sentence is built so that nobody would.

And it is a eulogy.

Tam Locke is forty-three years old. She is alive. She lives four miles from Bree's house, off Route 6, and she runs the nursery out there, the one with the good hanging baskets, and she is in the county phone listings and on the sign by the road.

For nine years they shared a row and a car and everything else. Tam has a laugh that starts before the joke is finished. She brought Bree a casserole when Bree's mother was in the hospital and stayed to do the dishes and did not say one wise thing the whole evening, which was the wisest thing anybody did that week.

Then Tam stopped coming.

There was no blowup. That is the part Bree cannot explain to people. Nothing was said. There was no scene, no letter, no burnt bridge. Tam simply was not there one week, and then not there for a month, and then it had been a year, and somewhere in there Bree stopped saying "Tam is" and started saying "Tam was."

Then a Saturday morning in April, twenty to eight, Bree is in her kitchen with the coffee going and her phone buzzes on the counter.

It is a photograph.

It is a ceramic rooster in the window of a thrift store on Route 6. It is the ugliest object in the western hemisphere. It is orange in places a rooster has no business being orange, and it has a look in its eye like it owes somebody money, and it is the exact rooster that made the two of them cry laughing in a junk shop parking lot in 2016.

No message. No caption. No how are you, no explanation, no reference to two years of anything.

Just the rooster.

Bree laughed out loud in her kitchen before she could decide not to.

And then she put the phone face down on the counter and stood there and cried, with the coffee maker still going, because it landed on her all at once.

Tam never put her in the past tense.

Tam has been in the present the entire time. Tam kept a photograph of an ugly rooster for two years because she saw something on a Saturday that belonged to somebody she still has.

Bree was the one who wrote the obituary.

She picked the phone back up and typed: STILL THE UGLIEST ROOSTER IN THE COUNTY.

Tam sent back three laughing faces.

And that was the entire conversation. Nothing was settled. Nothing was argued. Nobody explained a single thing, and nobody had to.

Considering thyself

Paul writes one sentence to a church about how to handle a person who has gone down somewhere, and the striking thing is where he spends the words.

Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.Galatians 6:1

Count the clauses. Exactly one of them is about the other person. All the rest are about the one doing the restoring, and what his face is doing, and where his eyes are. In the spirit of meekness. Considering thyself.

Paul does not hand anybody a diagnosis to carry around. He hands them a posture and a mirror.

And I am not going to hand you a diagnosis either. I do not know your friend, I do not know what she concluded or why, and this message has no opinion on it and is not going to develop one. That is not what is on the table today, and if you came here to have somebody settle it, I am going to disappoint you kindly.

Because there is exactly one thing in this whole situation that is genuinely yours, and it is not her. It is the sentence.

You know the one. The kind one. The two second one, with the little sad look on the front of it, that closes the subject so smoothly that no one ever asks a second question.

You are allowed to hold what you believe at your whole weight, and you have never once had to make her smaller in order to keep it steady. That is not my opinion about your convictions. The written word says restore in the spirit of meekness, and meekness in Scripture is never weakness, it is strength with its hand off the throat, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person able to do both at once.

Now hear the gentle part, because you did not decide to start speaking about her that way.

Grief does that. When somebody goes, the mind files them, because a file is easier to carry through a Tuesday than an open wound. Nobody sat down and chose to write an obituary for a living woman. It assembled itself, one careful sentence at a time, out of missing her.

The verdict you have handed down about her has no right to stay in your mouth, and it never had the standing to be there. Scripture says there is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy, and then asks the plainest question in the letter, who art thou that judgest another? The Spirit who convicts is not in the business of licensing us to file people.

Here is the line the whole thing turns on, and it is about you before it is about her.

You were loved out loud by God while you were in the middle of being wrong about several things, and He has never once put you in the past tense. The written word says that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps making that sentence present tense in a person who keeps forgetting it.

He did not wait for you to be correct before He came near you. He did not describe you to anybody in the perfect past. He held every ounce of what He is true and kept the door open at the same time, and He is the only one who has ever done both perfectly, and He is in you.

So no, nothing here asks you to give an inch of what you believe. Not one inch. Hold it with your whole weight.

This is yours: a conviction that does not need to be defended by a closed door. Scripture says the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, and it puts pure first on purpose, and the Spirit is well able to carry both in the same person on the same Saturday.