The Letter She Cannot Throw Away

The box has been in the spare room for six years under a folded camping chair, and she is finally doing it, because the room is going to be an office and something has to happen to the boxes.

She has been ruthless all afternoon and it has felt good. A charger for a phone that no longer exists. A lanyard. Three keys she cannot place. Two paperbacks. The bag is a third full and it is going out to the curb tonight, and there is a clean, bright satisfaction in it she has not had in weeks.

Then, near the bottom, under a folded scarf, an envelope.

She knows the handwriting before it is all the way out of the box. She does not open it. She could tell you most of it from memory, and the room she read it in the first time, and what the light was doing, and what she did for the rest of that day.

The bag is open at her feet. It would take a second and a half.

And she cannot. She sits back on her heels with the envelope in both hands, and what upsets her is not the sadness. The sadness is old and she has made her peace with most of it. What upsets her is that she cannot explain herself.

Because the honest question is already standing in the room: what does it say about a person that she is still carrying this. Four years in church. On the welcome team. She has said out loud in a small group that the old life is behind her, and she meant it. And here she is on a carpet with a whole afternoon of ruthlessness stopped dead by nine ounces of paper.

She puts it back under the scarf. She folds the flaps, carries the box to the closet, puts it on the shelf and closes the door, and she does not tell anybody about the afternoon.

You know the letter. Yours might be a photograph, or a jacket, or a phone number you have never deleted, or a recipe in somebody's handwriting. And you know the flinch that came with it, and the question underneath it, which was never really about the object.

Twelve stones out of the riverbed

Let me take you to a riverbed, because there is a scene in Scripture that nobody preaches and it is the exact shape of your afternoon.

Israel has just come through the Jordan. The water stood up in a heap, the priests stood in the middle of it with the ark, and the whole nation walked across on dry ground into the land. It is the crossing, the before and the after, with everything they were on one bank.

And the first thing God says on the far side is not what you would expect.

Take you twelve men out of the people, out of every tribe a man, and command ye them, saying, Take you hence out of the midst of Jordan, out of the place where the priests' feet stood firm, twelve stones, and ye shall carry them over with you.Joshua 4:2-3

Go back in. Reach into the middle of the thing you have just come out of, to the exact spot where it was worst and deepest, and pick something up, and carry it out with you.

You are being asked to hold something from the middle of the river, and you were never told to leave the crossing behind with nothing in your hands. It is written as a command rather than a concession, and the same Spirit who moved on Joshua is not embarrassed by an object that came out of the water with you.

Notice what those stones were. They were not souvenirs of Egypt. They were not fragments of the old life smuggled out. They were stones from the riverbed itself, from the place where the feet of the priests stood while the water was held back. The memorial was made of the crossing.

You have permission to carry the crossing rather than only the destination, and it is already the pattern in the word rather than a special case made for you. Joshua 4 has God commanding the carrying, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that chapter is not asking you to prove anything today by emptying your hands.

He kept the names in the genealogy

Now let me show you how God handles a history, because He has been consistent about it and the evidence is in the first page of the New Testament.

Matthew opens his gospel with a family tree. It is the line of Jesus Christ, and it is the most carefully kept list in the book, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to tidy.

He does not tidy it. Rahab is in it by name (Matthew 1:5), and everybody reading it in the first century knew exactly which Rahab and exactly what the word attached to her name had been. Ruth is in it, a Moabite, from a people Israel had every reason to leave off a list. Bathsheba is in it, referred to in a way that will not let anybody forget what happened.

God wrote the ancestry of His own Son and He kept the difficult names in it.

You are not being asked to produce a scrubbed version of your own line, and you were never handed an edit list. Matthew 1 keeps the names in on purpose, and it is His Spirit who decided what would stand in that record, which means the keeping is His instinct and not a weakness in yours.

And look at Paul, who had more to be ashamed of than most. He tells his own story out loud, repeatedly, to hostile crowds, and he names himself in it: he was a blasphemer and a persecutor (1 Timothy 1:13). He does not soften it and he does not bury it. He carries it, in his mouth, for the rest of his life, and it becomes the load bearing part of everything he says about mercy.

You have a history that is allowed to stay in the room with you, and you were not required to destroy it to be here. The word keeps Paul's own account of himself on the record, and the Spirit is the one who turns a kept thing into a testimony instead of a chain.

What the stones were actually for

Here is the part of the Joshua passage that settles the letter, and it is the reason God gave for the whole strange errand.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD.Joshua 4:6-7

The stones exist for a question that has not been asked yet. They are standing there in Gilgal so that a child, years later, walking past a pile of rocks, says what are those, and somebody gets to say what happened at that river.

A memorial is not nostalgia. Nostalgia looks back and wants to go back. A memorial looks back and says look how far the water was. They are opposite motions performed by the same object, and only one person in the room usually knows which one is happening.

You are holding something that is capable of being a memorial, and it is already in your hands rather than something you have to go and find. Joshua 4:7 gives the stones their whole purpose in a question a child asks, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an object into a sign rather than a snare.

I am not going to tell you what to do with your letter. I do not know what is in it, and there are things a person should genuinely put down, and there are objects that are still doing damage and a wise friend would say so. That discernment is yours and His, not mine.

You have the Spirit of God available for that decision, and He is already in the room where the box is. It is written that He guides into all truth, and He does that in a spare bedroom on a Saturday afternoon with a trash bag open, as readily as anywhere else.