Many Waters Did Not Put It Out

The eleven months had a shape to them and the shape was a corridor.

Ward B, second floor, the lift that everyone said was slow and everyone used anyway. The vending machine that took her money twice in one week and she cried about it in a way that had nothing whatever to do with the vending machine. The particular smell of that corridor, which she could pick out now in a room of a thousand smells.

She did everything right, if you can say that. She was there. She learned the names of every nurse on the rota. She did the difficult conversation with her brother in the car park and did it well. She held her father's hand on the last night for six hours and did not let go and did not sleep and did not, for one single minute of those eleven months, stop believing in God.

She just stopped talking to Him much. And then stopped noticing that she had.

That was two years ago in the spring, and the funeral was fine and the sandwiches were fine and everybody said she was doing well, and she went back to work and back to church and back to the second row, and she has not felt one thing in a service since.

What she has decided about herself, quietly, without ever putting it in a sentence, is this: while she was busy being a daughter, she let go of something, and it went out, and it is her fault for not tending it in a hard year.

What a flood can and cannot do

There is a line at the end of the Song of Solomon that I want to hold up next to those eleven months, because it was written about exactly this and almost nobody reads it that way.

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.Song of Solomon 8:7

Read what that sentence takes for granted before you read what it claims. It takes the water for granted. It does not say the flood will not come, and it does not say love stays dry. It assumes deep water and a lot of it, and then it tells you the one thing the water cannot do.

It cannot put it out.

You are looking at something the water went over and did not extinguish, right now, as you read this. That is not encouragement I am inventing to soften a hard two years; it is written down in a book that has survived every generation of people finding out what floods are like, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifts a line about many waters off a page and lays it over eleven months on a second-floor ward.

Now, be careful here, because there is a false version of this that would hurt you and I want to take it off the table. That verse is not telling you that you should not have felt anything. It is not a rebuke for going under. Going under is what the verse assumes.

Whose love the verse is actually about

Here is the part that changes everything, and it turns on one question: whose love is being described?

You have probably read that verse as being about yours. As a standard. As a bar you did not clear, because you went quiet in a corridor and stayed quiet through two springs.

But the love that many waters cannot quench is not a love a tired daughter generates at a bedside. It is the love that God has been demonstrating since before there was any of us to receive it, and every single thing Scripture says is unquenchable about it belongs to Him and not to you.

You have never once been the one keeping this alight, and the responsibility you have been carrying was never issued to you. God says out loud that He is the one who began the good work and the one who carries it through, and the Holy Spirit has been the seal on that through every hour of the eleven months, including the hours you were too tired to pray.

So let me say the true thing about that corridor. You did not let go of God in there. You held your father's hand for six hours and you did not sleep, and that is not the profile of a woman who abandoned anything.

And whatever went quiet in you during those months went quiet the way a person's voice goes when they have been talking for a year without stopping. That is a body. That is grief. Dry feeling is not sin and it is not distance, and grief is not a spiritual failure that needs confessing.

You are not standing under a charge, and no part of your standing with God is currently being reviewed. The written word puts a believer in Christ and keeps them there through every season, and the Holy Spirit does not audit a woman's temperature at a graveside.