He Set It All Up And I Am Afraid To Touch It

Fourteen months, and you have not changed one thing.

He did all of it. He chose how the house talks to itself, what comes on when, which name is on which account, where the numbers live. He did it because he liked doing it and because it saved you having to, and you never once asked how any of it worked because you never once needed to.

Now you need to.

And you sit in front of it and you do not touch it.

Not because you cannot work out what to press. Because of what it is. Because that arrangement is the last thing in this house that is still exactly the way he left it, and everything in you says that if you change it, some final small piece of him goes.

So it stays. And half of it does not suit you. And one part of it has been quietly annoying you since last spring and you have never said so out loud, because saying so out loud felt like a complaint against a man who is not here to answer it.

I want to talk to you about that arrangement, and I want to be careful with it, because it is not really an arrangement. It is a room in your house where he still is.

I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee

There is a line God says to a man at the exact moment somebody irreplaceable has gone, and I want you to hear who the promise is about.

There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. (Joshua 1:5, King James Version)

Moses had died. The whole thing had been arranged by Moses, and the man hearing this had spent forty years standing slightly behind him.

And God does not say Moses is still with you. He says I am. He says the arrangement was never the presence, and the one who is not going anywhere is the one who was in the room the whole time.

You are held by the one who was actually holding the two of you all along, and an arrangement in a house has never once been the thing that kept him near you. Joshua 1:5 puts the not forsaking on God rather than on anything Moses set up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that solid for a woman on her own at four in the afternoon.

Notice that God does not ask Joshua to keep anything exactly as it was. There is no instruction to preserve the tent, the order of the camp, the way Moses did things. Not one word of it.

What is preserved is the promise. What moves is everything else.

You have not been asked to keep anything frozen, and fourteen months of leaving it untouched have never once been the loyalty God required of you. The Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between honoring a man and being afraid of a cupboard, and Scripture puts the permanence in the promise rather than in the arrangement.

And there is something else in that verse worth having. It is spoken to somebody who was about to have to do things he had never done, publicly, in front of people who had watched somebody else do them well.

That is not a small comfort. That is the whole comfort.

You are the one God is speaking to now, and standing behind somebody for forty years has never once disqualified a person from standing up. It is written that God said I will be with thee, and the Spirit of God is the one who puts steel into a person taking over something they never asked to take over.

What he actually left you

Let me say something plain about the man, and then something plain about the arrangement.

He did not build that to be a monument. He built it so that you would not have to think about it. Every choice in it was made on a Tuesday afternoon by a man who wanted his wife's life to be easier, and not one of those choices was made to be permanent.

If he could tell you one thing about it right now, it would not be leave it alone. It would be something closer to change the one that annoys you, I only did it that way because I liked it.

You have his intention in your hands and not his instructions, and a preference he had in a spare hour has never once been a wish he left for you. The Spirit of God knows what a husband meant and not only what a husband managed to set up, and Scripture never once asks a widow to keep the furniture where it stood.

And here is what does not change when you change it. The years. The way he said your name. The Sunday he did the thing you still tell people about. The choices he made that were about you rather than about the house.

None of that lives in an arrangement. It never did. It lives where it has always lived, and nothing you press can reach it.

That is not sentiment. That is a fact about where a marriage is kept.

You are carrying him in the only place he was ever kept, and no small change in a front room has ever once been able to reach into it. Joshua 1:5 promises a presence that outlasts the man who organized everything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who guards what is real while the arrangements move.

Change one thing on purpose

Now the practical half, and I am going to keep it small on purpose.

I am not going to tell you what to press, and I am not going to name anything on that screen, because what is there this year will have moved by the next and an instruction that names a thing becomes a lie inside two years. What I will give you is a rule, and the rule outlasts the screen.

Almost everything he arranged can be changed back. That is the shape of these things. If you change it and hate it, the same motion that changed it puts it back, and the change was a visit rather than a demolition.

So change something that is genuinely yours to change. Something small. Something that has been annoying you since spring.

You are able to change one small thing and go back if you want to, and a preference in a house has never once been a locked door. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a woman doing something small and brave that nobody else would call brave, and Joshua 1:5 stands underneath her while she does it.

And do it on purpose, in daylight, deliberately, not quickly and guiltily while nobody is watching.

Because the guilt is the part that needs dealing with. The pressing is nothing. The guilt is the thing that has kept an intelligent woman sitting in front of a screen for fourteen months, apologizing to a man who would be upset to know it.

You are not committing anything against him, and one deliberate change has never once been a betrayal of a marriage. The written word puts God in the room saying I will not fail thee, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the guilt out of a woman's hands and leaves the choice in them.