I Kept Checking Like A Bruise

She has a way of doing it that takes about two seconds and that nobody has ever seen her do.

She goes quiet, somewhere in the middle of herself, and she presses. Not physically. It is an inward gesture, and the nearest thing to it in the ordinary world is what you do with a bruise on your shin: you put your thumb on it, deliberately, to find out whether it still hurts, having established some time ago that it does.

She checks whether anything is different in there.

She started the week after. That first week it was hourly, and it was almost cheerful, the way you check a plant you have just put in the ground. By the end of the month it was daily. By the end of the year it had become one of those things a person does without knowing they are doing it, like touching a pocket for keys.

She is thirty-six. She was nineteen.

Seventeen years of a small inward press, several times a day, always asking the same question, always getting the same answer, which is not no exactly. It is more like static. It is the sound of a woman asking her own interior to file a report that her interior has never been equipped to produce.

She would like it on the record that she is not unwell about this. She has a good life. She keeps bees, which she took up at thirty and which has been better for her than eleven years of anything else. She is not anxious in general. She would strike you as one of the calmest people you know.

But there is a small ritual that happens several times a day, and it is looking for evidence, and it has been coming back empty for seventeen years.

And a thing that comes back empty for seventeen years starts, gradually and without any single moment you could point to, to feel like an answer.

The instrument was never fitted

I want to say the mechanical thing first, because I think it will do more for you than the tender thing, and then I will say the tender thing.

You have been asking a part of yourself for information it does not hold.

Your interior can report on mood. It is quite good at that. It can tell you when you are tired, when a room is wrong, when somebody you love is not all right. It is a fine instrument within its range.

It cannot report on your standing before God, because that was never located there. It is not a sense you have. It is a status somebody else holds, and asking your own chest about it is like asking your knee what the weather will do next week: the knee is real, and the weather is real, and the connection is not what you have been assuming.

So seventeen years of static is not seventeen years of bad news. It is seventeen years of a question arriving at the wrong department.

Now the tender thing.

Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.John 20:29

Notice who Jesus is speaking about. Not Thomas. He turns, in that sentence, past the man in front of Him, and speaks a blessing over people who are not in the room and will never get what Thomas just got.

That is you. That is the specific category being blessed: those who do not receive the confirmation and believe anyway.

You are the one Jesus turned and spoke a blessing over, and that is not my consolation for a woman who has been checking a bruise, it is the sentence He said out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is arriving in the ritual rather than in your knowledge of John 20.

And notice that He does not say blessed are they who eventually get their own version of this. There is no deferred confirmation in the sentence. The blessing is on the not-seeing itself.

I want to say something about the beekeeping, because I think it is more relevant than it looks.

You cannot open a hive whenever you want to know how it is doing. Open it too often and you set the colony back, and every beekeeper learns early that most of what is going on in there has to be inferred from the outside and trusted, and that the impulse to keep lifting the lid is the beginner's impulse and it costs the bees.

You have known how to do this for six years with an actual colony, and Scripture puts your standing outside your own inspection, and the Spirit of God who has been in you since nineteen is not a thing that needs the lid lifted several times a day to still be there.

And here is the last of it. You are believing without seeing, which is the thing He called blessed, and seventeen years of static was never an answer, and the reason the checking has come back empty is not that the hive is empty. It is that you have been looking for a colony with the wrong sense.

You are the one Jesus turned and spoke a blessing over, and He did it looking past the man in front of Him. The word says blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed, and the Holy Spirit has been in you since nineteen without ever once offering a reading.