Six Years of Leaving It Open

She has never once said, out loud, that it is over. That is the whole architecture of the last six years.

If somebody asks about her, she says, we are not really in touch at the moment. At the moment. Six years of at the moment.

She has kept her number in her phone. She has never unfollowed her anywhere. She thinks about her at least weekly, usually while doing something ordinary, and every single time the thought arrives in the same shape: not yet, not finished, still open.

She has called this hope, and she has been rather proud of it, because the alternative sounded like bitterness and she is not a bitter woman.

But in February she was walking back from the shop and she noticed something that has been bothering her ever since. She is not tired of missing her. She is tired of the holding. The missing is a clean sort of ache and she can live with it. The holding is something else, and it goes on all day, quietly, underneath everything, like a hand keeping a door from swinging shut.

And here is what she has never said to a living soul: she suspects that what she has been calling hope is actually a job, and that she has been doing it, unpaid and alone, for six years.

Holding a door is work

Let me name it before anything is lifted, because I do not think anybody has ever named it for you.

Leaving something open is not passive. That is the discovery you made walking back from the shop, and it is entirely correct. A door that stays open in a draft requires somebody's hand on it, permanently, and the hand does not get to do anything else while it is there.

You have not been failing to move on. You have been performing a continuous small labor, every day, for six years, and calling it a virtue because the word for it sounded like hope.

You are not bitter and you never were, and the tiredness you are carrying is a real load rather than a character flaw. That is not a kind reading somebody is offering you. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which covers a woman who has been holding something with one hand for six years without noticing she was doing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one raising it now to take a weight off rather than to add one.

And there is one sentence in the whole of Scripture that settles what finishing is, and it is not spoken by anybody in your situation.

When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.John 19:30

He said it. Not the disciples, not the women at the foot of it, not anybody who had been waiting. Him. The declaring of a thing as finished belongs to the one who did the work, and the work in question is the one that actually settles a person's account.

Which means the finishing you have been refusing to say was never yours to say in the first place. It was never on your list.

Openness and hope are not the same thing

Hope is something you receive and it is light. Openness, in the way you have been doing it, is something you maintain and it is heavy.

You may keep the number. Nothing here tells you to delete anything, and this page will not hand you a gesture to perform.

You are already carrying hope rather than manufacturing it, and the difference is who is doing the work. Scripture puts it plainly in Romans 15:13, where the God of hope fills you with joy and peace in believing so that you abound in hope by the power of the Holy Ghost, and the Spirit named in that verse is the one supplying it, which means you were never the source of the thing you have been straining to keep alive.

Where your part ends

Say this plainly and do not soften it. Being released is never the same as being pushed at anybody, and nothing here tells you to reach out or to declare anything over. This category does not advise contact. And if there is a reason the distance between you has been a protection, then it has been a protection and this page will not call it a failure. Get yourself safe, tell one real person who can actually do something, and hold this: safety comes before reconciliation, always.

Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.Psalm 32:7

Compass me about. Surrounded, on every side, by something that was not built by the person being surrounded. You are already encircled, and the circle does not have a gap in it that your hand is holding shut. Psalm 32:7 puts the preserving in God rather than in your vigilance, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the compassing while a woman finally lets go of a door.