Seventeen Arrives Without Warning

It came in the supermarket, between the bread and the tinned tomatoes, because somebody two aisles away was wearing a particular aftershave.

Bronwen is fifty two. She was in the middle of deciding about tomatoes.

And she was seventeen again, entirely, in about a second and a half, and it was not a thought and it was not a memory in the way people mean when they say memory. It was the whole thing at once: the room, the sound the door made, the specific cold of that particular winter, all of it, in a supermarket, on a Tuesday, at eleven in the morning.

She stood there for a moment. Then she put the tomatoes in the trolley and finished the shopping and drove home and put it all away.

That was three weeks ago and it has happened twice since.

For a long time this did not happen. Not because it was healed and not because she had dealt with it, but because there was something in the way, most evenings, and the something in the way blunted the edges of everything including this. She stopped last spring. And this is one of the things that has come back into focus, and there is no warning, and there is no pattern, and it arrives in the middle of ordinary life without asking.

She has never told anybody what happened when she was seventeen.

You know that arrival. It might be a smell, a piece of music, a particular light in the afternoon. Something old comes into the room at full size, without knocking, in the middle of something completely ordinary, and there is nothing between you and it anymore.

You are being carefully handled rather than examined, and you were never going to be asked to open something up in a supermarket aisle. The psalm says He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds, and binding is the slow, careful, repeated work of a person who intends to be there a while; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real description of what is happening to you at fifty two.

He bindeth up their wounds

Let me be careful here, and I am going to be very careful, because this is the exact place where writing can do harm.

I do not know what happened when you were seventeen. I am not going to guess, and I am not going to tell you what it means, and I am not going to tell you what you should do about it. A page cannot know you and anybody who claims otherwise is not to be trusted with this.

And I am not going to tell you that facing it is what will keep you standing. That is not true, and putting your whole life on the far side of something you did not choose and have never spoken about would be cruel.

What I can tell you is what God is described as doing.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

Look at the second verb, because the second verb is the one that matters for a Tuesday morning between the bread and the tomatoes. Bindeth up. Binding is not the same as mending. Binding is what you do around a thing that is not yet mended: you wrap it, you support it, you keep it from being knocked, and then you come back and do it again tomorrow. It assumes time. It assumes repetition. It assumes somebody willing to be there for the whole of it.

You are inside slow careful work rather than a single event, and you were never behind schedule. That is what stands written in Psalm 147, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes binding a real description of a life at fifty two rather than a picture of something that should have happened by now.

And notice where that verse sits, because the setting is extraordinary. The verse before it says He telleth the number of the stars and calleth them all by their names. The verse after it says great is our Lord and of great power. The binding up of a wounded heart is placed, deliberately, in the middle of a passage about the size of God, as though the psalmist wanted nobody to imagine that the careful work is done by somebody small.

You are being bound up by the one who counts the stars, and you were never being handled by anybody less than that. Scripture puts the binding between the stars and the greatness on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps those two facts in the same room.

And the broken in heart is a phrase, not a diagnosis. It does not require you to be able to name what happened. It does not ask for a category or an account. It is a description of a condition, and the psalm treats the condition itself as sufficient reason for God to be doing what He is doing.

You are qualified by the condition and you were never going to be asked to describe it first, including to Him. The written word names the state and not the cause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real relief for a woman who has never said any of it out loud.

And now the plain thing, and I want you to hear it as care and not as instruction. What arrived in that aisle is worth taking to somebody trained to sit with it. Not because you must, and not on any timetable, and not because your sobriety depends on it, but because a person who does this for a living can hold what a supermarket aisle cannot. A counselor, your doctor, a friend, a room where people say true things. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and reaching for it is not a failure of faith, and there is no deadline on it.