His List Is In His Handwriting And I Cannot Read It

It is one page and it is entirely in his hand.

There are abbreviations that meant something to him. There are two columns and you are not certain which one is which. There is a symbol he used, a small mark that appears eleven times, and you have never known what it stands for.

He wrote it for himself. That is all it ever was. A working page, made by a man for his own use, never once intended for anybody else's eyes.

And now it is the only page there is, and you are the one holding it.

And here is the thing you have not said to anybody. You feel that you are failing him.

Not failing at the practical matter. Failing him. As though a wife who had paid proper attention over forty-one years would be able to read her husband's shorthand, and your not being able to read it is a measure of something.

I want to take that apart, carefully, because it is not true, and because it is doing a great deal of damage to somebody who is already carrying enough.

Two are better than one

There is a line about two people together, and the reason it gives is worth reading slowly.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. (Ecclesiastes 4:9, King James Version)

Two are better than one. The reason given is not that two people are individually stronger. It is that the work of two together produces something neither would have had alone.

That is a description of what the two of you had. Not two people who each knew everything, but two people whose knowing added up.

You have been living inside what that verse describes, and no arrangement where two people each held half has ever once been a weakness in either of them. Ecclesiastes 4:9 says two are better than one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that plain to a woman rereading forty-one years as though she should have been two people all along.

Notice what the passage says next, in the verses after, about one falling and the other lifting him up. The whole chapter is about the practical advantages of not being alone.

Nowhere in it does it suggest that each of the two should have been able to do it all separately. That would defeat the entire point of the passage.

You were never supposed to be able to do both halves, and no marriage has ever once been arranged so that each person duplicated the other. The Holy Spirit is the one who protects a person from grading themselves against something that was never the arrangement, and it is written that the reward belongs to the labor of the two.

And there is one more thing worth having. The verse says the two of them have a good reward for their work. Past and present. The reward was real and it was received.

Forty-one years of a working arrangement is not undone by the fact that it ended. It happened. It was good. It stands.

You have a reward that was genuinely received and cannot now be taken back, and no ending has ever once reached backward to spoil what actually happened. The Spirit of God is the one who guards what was real against the grief that comes after it, and Scripture puts the good reward in the plain past tense.

What that page actually is

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not decode a page.

Look at what that page really is. It is one man's private working notes. Shorthand is by definition personal. It exists to save the writer time and it is written for one reader.

Nobody else on earth could read that page. Not his brother. Not a professional. Not somebody clever. It was never a document. It was a man talking to himself in writing. Nobody ever told her that, and a gap in the teaching is not a gap in a wife.

You are holding something that was only ever legible to one person, and a private page has never once been a test that anybody else could have passed. The Spirit of God is the one who tells the difference between a document and a man's own notes, and Ecclesiastes 4:9 puts the value in the two rather than in either one.

And here is the second half, which is the part that matters most. Not being able to read it is not a failure of attention over forty-one years.

You were not being inattentive. You were doing the other half. While he was making that page, you were doing eleven things that he could not have done and would not have known how to begin, and there is no page anywhere recording those, and nobody has ever suggested that his not being able to do them was a measure of his love.

You were doing the other half the whole time, and no division of labor has ever once been evidence about how much anybody paid attention. The written word puts the reward on the labor of the two together, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names what a woman actually did rather than what she did not.

Read what you can

Now the small thing, and it does not require decoding anything.

I am not going to tell you how to work out the page, and I am not going to suggest you take it to somebody, though you may want to and there would be nothing wrong in it.

Read out loud the parts of that page you can read.

You are able to read out the parts that are plain, and reading a page out loud has never once obliged anybody to understand all of it. Ecclesiastes 4:9 has the good reward attached to the labor of two, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at a table with a woman and her husband's handwriting.

Read them at a normal volume, in the room, on your own. Some of it will be perfectly clear, and hearing the clear parts in your own voice does something that reading them silently does not.

Then say the second thing out loud, which is the one that matters. Say, the rest of it was his.

Not, I cannot read it. Not, I should be able to. The rest of it was his.

You are naming a division rather than confessing a shortfall, and one true sentence said out loud has never once been a failure of love toward anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who puts an accurate sentence in a person's mouth, and it is written that two together held what neither held alone.